Isabel grinned and gave his shoulder a playful shove. “You can say that again. Though God only knows what kind of folks will be coming out here in those airplanes.”
“You’ll get used to it. The first plane that stops here is taking me home.”
“Really, Keith?” She felt a pang of sorrow. “I thought this was your home.”
“It is, mate,” he said softly. “But I heard from my lover, the last shipment before the Pylon shut down.”
“He’s still alive then! That’s wonderful; I’m so glad for you.”
“You’ll be coming out to Sydney, too, won’t you?”
“To the Uni.”
“I’ll show you the town. We’ll see The Magic Flute at the Whale.”
“Thanks.” Watching the scale on his eyelid, Isabel thought of something. “Keith—let’s not wait for the town to decide. Let’s go out right now with our angelbees, to the Wall, and walk through.”
Keith considered this, then he laughed shortly. “Sure, let’s have a go.”
They walked through the cemetery, listening to the swooping cries of barn owls who glimmered out of the foliage. Other bright things rustled and scampered across the pine needles, mice and squirrels stocking up for winter, all shining brilliant infrared against the cold ground. In the sky amid the still stars hung a late crescent moon. The keepers’ red satellite, their dying Hive, slowly crossed the sky through Orion’s uplifted arm. Somewhere there was the little hypersphere, with the little sheep she had left behind. Le mouton, would the sheep eat the flower or not?
Beneath the Wall, the ground was bare and dark. Isabel showed Keith how to bring down the angelbee and melt one’s way, slowly, through. At the other side they stumbled forward, to the edge of the piled bones, human and animal, equally dark and cold. Freedom…
Carefully Isabel stepped onto the bones and climbed, one foot after the other. The wall of piled skeletons was only a couple of feet high, not so high as it had looked from inside. A child could climb it. She sat on top, balancing precariously on an uncomfortable perch, and her angelbee eyes looked out upon the deadland.
The deadland was no longer dead. Throughout the growth of wild grasses, a hundred bright little things were scurrying in and out of holes. Mice, they must be, probably common field mice. Some time in the past year a couple must have slipped out of Gwynwood with the angelbees, or perhaps just one, a pregnant cousin of Peewee’s, released into the deadland like a microbe inoculated into a sterile flask. Now, as her angelbee watched from above, here were their myriad descendants, bright sparks appearing and vanishing in the dark like the Perseid shower. A living Christmas tree.
Keith had climbed up beside her. “Beautiful, isn’t it. It gives me the oddest feeling, as if those were all the souls of the dead creeping out to claim their land.” He paused, then added, “How long d’you think we’ve got?”
“How long? Until what?”
“Until the next Doomsday.”
Her scalp prickled as she gradually realized his meaning. “I don’t know. The keepers tried to teach us, but what did they know?” And what had she learned? Peace Hope had said once, about learning to draw, “One has to start out bad, to get to be good.”
On impulse she took from her pocket Keith’s cigarette lighter that she had carried throughout her captivity, an ambiguous token of power. Haroset. She turned it over twice, then tossed it away. It fell into a hollow between two long bones.
“It’s not that killing is always wrong,” Isabel explained. “It’s just that even the most intelligent creatures in the universe are too foolish to be entrusted with a sword, let alone a keeper’s cylinder. We’d all be better off like Grace.”
“Really?” said Keith. “Those Shades could have mowed us all down instead. What good would Grace have done then?”
“Maybe it’s too bad we let the keepers save us. We should have sacrificed our whole species, for the sake of the animals.”
“What would the existence of animals matter, without humans to care? Who else creates meaning in the universe?”
To that there was no simple answer. Isabel shivered as the cold air penetrated her jacket.
“Who knows?” Keith added. “Habits die hard, but I kicked one. Fair go; we may make it yet.”
“One can do it,” Isabel agreed, “but a whole species? Maybe.” Maybe the light would come.
Joan Slonczewski is a former organizer for the nuclear freeze campaign and a member of the Society of friends. She teaches biology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and two children.
The Wall Around Eden Page 30
