The Wall Around Eden

by Joan Slonczewski

  “So many lay there, it was hard to tell the dead from the living. That is, the dying. I could tell some had a breath of life left, since Sarah tried to nurse a few.”

  “Firewood was getting scarce, Janet said. I saw our house ripped apart for firewood, a little at a time. The deer got scarce, too. A man shot the setter for meat, while Janet was out foraging.”

  “I can’t say for sure exactly when Sarah died. She wasn’t moving for a while. I finally faced it when the snow fell, covering the bodies. Black snow. This sounds foolish now, but I remember thinking, in my grief, at least she should have had white for a shroud.”

  “I knew when Angie died, because Janet stopped trying to feed her water. I tried to say…something to Janet…”

  “We started our own graveyard, just inside the Wall. Why was that? I suppose we wanted to show them, we were dying, too.”

  “Those left alive outside started on the human bodies because there was nothing else left to eat. Janet kept watch over Angie, at first. Until one day she didn’t come back.”

  “The last ones died, was it…November? December? I had other things to worry about, with all the patients expecting treatment upstairs.”

  “One man froze to death with his eyes open. He stared in at us all winter.”

  “I didn’t think of it much, what with Jem dying, and I myself couldn’t keep my food down. I miscarried at six months, because of the radiation, Dr. Chase said. When spring came, and the earth outside the Wall glistened as it began to thaw, I had the strangest feeling that all those bodies would wake up and come alive again. I still have dreams about it, sometimes.”

  XLIV

  IT WAS NEARING midnight when Isabel stepped out on the porch for a breath of air. The night sky was overcast without wind, the bare branches of trees carrying just a few dry leaves left. Isabel looked out, unmoving, her fingers cramped, her throat swollen although she had spoken little that evening.

  The storm door squeaked open as a woman came out to join her. It was Anna, who came and put her arm around Isabel, drawing her close. Then Isabel found herself weeping soundlessly. “I’m sorry,” she said in a husky voice, “it’s silly but I can’t help thinking of all those poor deer. Why did they have to go first? It wasn’t their fault; they never paid any taxes.”

  “It’s always been that way,” Anna said, her round face shining like a moon set in the smooth darkness of her hair.

  “It isn’t right. If we humans had to mess ourselves up, fine. But couldn’t we leave the animals alone?”

  “Every creature is part of creation. They can escape their fate no more than we.”

  “The Bible says God gave us dominion over animals. I can’t imagine why.”

  “The Buddha teaches to that, I think. I remember one of the Jatakas that my grandmother used to tell. In this tale, the Buddha appeared in the incarnation of a noble prince. One day in a forest the prince came upon a starving tigress, so desperate she was ready to eat her own cubs. Instead, the prince lay down and let the tigress devour his flesh. This deed of compassion was so noble, it is said, that for many years afterward the forest shone with a golden light. That is how humans were meant to govern the beasts.”

  Isabel nodded, and her voice steadied. “That is the kind of God the sheep and ox would have hoped for in the manger. It’s easy enough for a God to sacrifice Himself for humankind; but for a tigress? That’s the God for me.”

  XLV

  IN THE MORNING, Isabel drove her family to Worship, as she had for so many years, though now it was a tight squeeze to fit her parents and Daniel and Keith in the back seats. Jael in her clown suit watched the scenery wide-eyed from her perch between Daniel’s arms. They traveled the old familiar route, past the decayed highway and the burned-down Sewell place, up Radnor Lane through the pine forest. Isabel clucked absently to Jezebel, too deep in thought to give the mare much guidance. Fortunately Jezebel knew her way well enough. As the Meetinghouse appeared, with the cross and the Star of David perched crookedly atop the tar-paper roof, it occurred to Isabel to wonder what symbols the Buddhists chose to mark their worship.

  The mood of the worshipers was curiously mixed. Sal and Jon, and Deliverance, looked sunken in the eyes as if they had slept little the night before. Peace Hope, in her usual gray Quaker dress, actually wore a white ribbon in her hair. Deliverance whispered that this defiance of plain dress and parental authority had caused some commotion at the Scattergoods’. As the star of their escape from the hypersphere, Peace Hope had taken full advantage of her enhanced standing in the town, offering her collected angelbee scales to anyone interested. Even Ruth had accepted one, so that she might learn to “see” the way Becca had—and to make her way through the Wall, if she dared. What the keepers would have to say about all this was anyone’s guess.

  Worship began as always with the intensity of silence. Then Debbie led the programmed service, reading from the Psalm One Hundred Twenty-six, “Those who sow in tears shall reap with songs of joy.” Sal and Jon were teaching the Sunday School now; as Worship closed, the youngsters piled in, raucous as ever. The Pestlethwaite twins, their fingers fluttering like butterflies as they signed, had grown a good head taller since she had seen them last. Miracle called to his sister Faith, “Let’s go out and climb the Wall!”

  Liza rose from her seat, calling in her strong voice for any announcements.

  Peace Hope got herself up to speak, holding her crutches firmly, her ribbon conspicuous in her hair. “We have heard, now, of how the Wall came to be. The time has come to declare the Wall open.”

  Isabel’s blood raced, and she glanced about the room. Matthew said at last, “Peace Hope is right. The Wall is open to anyone with an angelbee.”

  Liza nodded. “We must consider this immediately. Will those who can, please stay afterward to discuss the future of the Wall.”

  As the worshipers got up for tea, the children raced as usual around the long benches.

  Where was Jael? Isabel wondered suddenly. Daniel was talking with Peace Hope, and the baby was nowhere to be seen. As the newest infant in town, Jael had to get passed around to everyone. Isabel scanned the faces and teacups to locate her.

  From behind, near the door, came a voice: “My baby!” Isabel turned. Of all people, Jael was in the hands of Grace Feltman. Grace held the baby’s head up well enough as she swung her back and forth, saying to everyone who passed, “See, my baby!” Nonetheless, Isabel shook her head in annoyance. She should have known Daniel would let Grace have Jael sooner or later. She took a step toward the door to reclaim her child.

  The door opened with sudden force, as if kicked in, banging with a thud against the log wall. As startled heads turned, five Shades walked in, cylinders pointed straight ahead of them into the room full of people.

  Isabel froze at the sight, the blood draining from her face. From behind came gasps and a scream.

  Before her, Grace opened her eyes and mouth wide at the sight of the shaggy strangers in mirrorshades. “Visitors!” She lurched forward toward the man in front, whom Isabel recognized as their leader, Dirk Brendan. “You haven’t seen my baby yet!” With that she half fell onto Dirk, who let the cylinder fall to his side as he caught the baby.

  Jael reacted by reflexively throwing her arms out straight, then let out a wail, transformed in an instant from a wide-eyed angel to an indignant bundle of arms and legs. Meanwhile, Grace ran off, calling, “Aunt Li-iza, there’s more visitors to see my baby!”

  For a wild moment Isabel thought: They’re hungry, they’re raiding for meat, like the dead beyond the Wall.

  In an instant she was there in front of Dirk, to snatch her child from his arms. Still struggling in the man’s inexperienced grasp, Jael’s hand knocked the glasses from his face, revealing flat gray-blue eyes that matched his sandy hair. As Isabel’s hands closed upon the infant, her eyes met those of Dirk for the first time. A new thought struck her, almost in wonder: This apparition before her was a man, after all. Somehow, before in the H
ive, he had seemed to her more alien than the keepers.

  “Welcome, friends,” came Liza’s voice from behind Isabel. “You have nothing to fear from us. We invite you to share our table tonight.”

  Any plans for the Wall were overtaken by the confusion of absorbing the five new transportees. For that was what the handful of Shades turned out to be, a dubious parting gift from the Hive, whose residents had at last tired of the waxworms in their comb.

  “Congratulations,” Megan told Isabel. “I’ll bet you’re relieved not to be preggo anymore.”

  “Thanks. What brings you here?” Isabel asked warily.

  “The rovers smoked us out of our camp,” Megan told her. “When we got out into the Hive, they barred the way back with fire—I never saw such a thing, from those space cockies. Then they knocked us to sleep, and here we are.”

  “What about their Queen?” Isabel asked her. “Did Bob ever reach the Queen’s cell?”

  “Bob never made it.” The line of Megan’s lips tightened; her expression behind her opaque glasses could not be guessed. “He got caught in the crossfire…” She looked away, then back suddenly. “Of course, we reached the Queen cell. But what do you think? It was empty.”

  Isabel’s mouth fell open. “So you never…hurt the Queen.”

  “We never found her. Nobody’s ever actually seen her, that I know of. It stands to reason, doesn’t it. Why would they let us get anywhere near her? What bloody fools they made of us, all that time.”

  Isabel thought of the Queen image she had shaped, and the images she had seen, the pregnant skeleton, and the empty Queen cell. She stared ahead, unseeing.

  Daniel caught her arm gently. “Is thee all right?”

  “Yes,” Isabel whispered. Before her, Megan was turning away, at the approach of Vera Brown. “Daniel…What if there never was a Queen? What if she died, long before the keepers got here?”

  His fingers tensed. “How could that be?”

  “Remember, the lifespan of a Hive is a thousand years. If a Queen dies without replacement, perhaps the keepers go on living, obeying their caring instincts, seeking something to care for in her place, if not another Queen then…”

  “Us?”

  “The human race, a species threatened with a fate like theirs.”

  “But surely they could find another Queen,” Daniel said, “on their home planet.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps,” she added, her voice breaking, “the keepers all ended as we did.” Or worse, lost their planet altogether, as Dirk had claimed before.

  Dirk, meanwhile, was standing a few feet off sipping tea with Liza, who appeared to be trying to convince him to put aside his keeper cylinder for a while. Dirk shook his head earnestly, his mane of hair sweeping back across his neck. “Ma’am, you’ve got it backward. In fact, the firearm is the poor woman’s best friend. It’s the great equalizer: you don’t need strength to use it. If you lived where I grew up, you’d be glad to tote a handgun.”

  “Would thee care to walk a city street where every purse contained a handgun?”

  “At least we wouldn’t need police anymore. Not that city cops were ever good for much. The cities were the breeding grounds of statist oppression. The best thing the space cockies ever did was to get rid of cities.”

  A sound arose, outside the Meetinghouse, a faint rumbling sound. An earthquake, Isabel thought; but no, it was a steady sound, from above. Children near the door raced out to see.

  It was an airplane. “A turboprop,” Matthew exclaimed, craning his neck upward along with everyone else. The airplane traced a straight line east across the blue sky, until it faded into the horizon.

  Somewhere, a Wall had fallen.

  XLVI

  THE NEW TRANSPORTEES were taken into various homes for the night. Marguerite, who was the most experienced at handling new arrivals, took Dirk and another man to stay in the hospital rooms. Isabel at first feared Keith’s reaction once he recalled the role of the Shades in the destruction of his home district in Sydney. But if he felt anything, he showed no outward sign, soon trotting off arm in arm with the Shades’ leader, exchanging unintelligible chatter from Down Under. Isabel herself wondered how she would sleep at night, knowing those people were in the house.

  If the Walls were falling, even the deadland would soon be open. Where would she go? That evening, she found herself digging through the attic, reclaiming her own roots in the outside world. The dusty scrapbook had a picture of her Grandfather Chase, in his second “career” after duty in Vietnam, demonstrating at the missile factory he had broken into. That was in a suburb of Philadelphia; she would have to ask her mother where. Grandfather’s face was as dark as Marguerite’s, and he wore wire-rim glasses that gave him a studious look. He was smiling tranquilly, his hand resting on the wall of a huge orange missile tube splotched with letters in his own blood. The letters spelled, “Auschwitz.” Grandfather Chase had lived to see those letters come true.

  The next pages had baby pictures of her mother. Marguerite’s skin had been pale at birth, like Jael’s, although it had darkened later; Jael would darken, too. Isabel turned another page, and there were more baby pictures, Marguerite’s two dead brothers.

  The last picture was from Marguerite’s graduation from Kenyon, a real college out in Ohio. It gave her a start to see her mother’s face so young, echoing her own fiercely proud expression, the flat black cap with the tassel hanging down, standing between the two gateposts that marked the old entrance to the college. Did those gateposts still stand?

  As she stood up in the attic to ease her back, the fullness of her breasts reminded her it was time for the day’s last nursing. Downstairs, Daniel had bathed the infant by now and bundled her up for the chilly night.

  After the nursing was done, she held up Jael for one last look before setting her in the crib, which had been hers originally though it had circulated throughout the town since. Jael held her gaze for what seemed an unusually long time. “She has your eyes,” Isabel told Daniel. “Like lodestars.”

  “Really?” He sounded abashed, and his cheeks colored in the candlelight.

  Isabel laid the infant down, adjusting her head with care. Jael’s eyelids shut readily, and her face assumed that serene look of an infant ready to sleep. Suddenly it occurred to her where she had seen that look before, the eyelids down, the lips drawn small between the rounded cheeks. It was the gaze of the Buddha figure in her old history book, the face of eternal peace.

  When Isabel turned around, she saw Daniel sitting on her bed, his head out of the light, his shoulders shaking slightly. She was astonished to realize that he was crying, crying without sound.

  “Daniel?” She held him close but felt helpless to comfort him. She had never seen him cry before, and it seemed to be shaking him apart inside.

  “It is too beautiful,” he said. “One pool of light, in such a vast darkness.”

  “Surely there’s more hope for us than that.”

  “I thought the keepers held the answer, once,” he reminded her. “But I can’t believe that any longer. The keepers ended as we did, only worse: they lost their whole planet, and there was no other ‘keeper’ to save them.”

  “Only dying keepers left without a future.” Queenless living ghosts, trapped forever in the universe outside the Wall. “But there’s one thing,” Isabel remembered suddenly. “The angelbees: they survived. They will outlive the keepers because they chose us.”

  Out the window in the dark, three of the silvery symbionts hovered faithfully, two of them swelling at the side, ready soon to bud offspring.

  Daniel smiled fleetingly, and for a moment his eyes lit up like they used to. “The angelbees taught me one thing, that living creatures glow like stars. And the stars…Do you remember the old paradox: If stars fill the sky to infinity, then why is the night sky not infinitely bright? The answer is that most of the stars are too far off for their light to reach us yet, though they’ve shined for a billion years. So their light shines on in t
he darkness, though we do not see it yet.” He reached out to Isabel at last, responding to her touch. “It’s important, to have a way of seeing through a dark time. To keep waiting, for the light to come.”

  Isabel tried to sleep, but her dreams kept ending with the appearance of a desperate Shade from around the corner. At last she sat up in bed, the sharp chill of night air hitting her face. Beside her, Daniel lay with his head turned away, fast asleep. She got out of bed, intending to get a drink of water from the pitcher in the hall. On the way out she felt for Jael in the crib, the tiny rounded bundle whose chest rose and fell reassuringly.

  There was a light on in the clinical lab down the hall. She frowned and walked across to investigate, hugging her arms against the chill.

  Keith sat there, one eye peering into the microscope, the other eye covered by an angelbee scale which he was trying to learn how to use.

  “Specimens, at this hour?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep. Here, take a look at this. It’s from Carl’s fermentation vat.”

  Isabel squinted into the eyepiece and focused the slide. Bright globes of yeast appeared against the dark field, some of them budding off like angelbees. Microbes could be symbionts too, producing beer and cheese, even aiding human digestion.

  “What’s with you?” Keith asked.

  “Those Shades still worry me.” Isabel shuddered. “I can’t help it. I saw what they did with the cylinders before.”

  “No fear. I got the rayguns away from them.”

  “You what?” Isabel eyed him suspiciously. “Come on, Keith. What’ve you been up to?”

  “I traded for them.”

  “Traded for what?”

  “A keg of Carl’s finest. They’d had a couple of pots by then already, you see.”

  Isabel was still suspicious. “You slipped something else in, too, I know you.”

  “Too right. Remember, these are the same guys that blew up Paddo. No way I’m letting those bloody breeders pull their tricks here.”