X
THE SEPTEMBER HERALD, which had arrived with Keith, was headlined, SKY BURNS FIVE DAYS. That reportedly was two days shorter than the shortest such episode on record. The paper speculated that there was barely any ozone left to get rid of. But no one knew for sure how much ozone there was outside. Isabel wondered if their vigil had made the difference.
There was no follow-up on the blast at the Wall. The zoo column featured the two-year-old gorilla Bin-Bin, who had just learned to spell out, “Want to play football.” The science column offered a clue to the nature of airwalls. It involved a distortion of the twenty-third dimension, based on a fifth force giving rise to hypercharge…Teacher Matthew might help with this.
In the hospital, Keith soon made his reputation. He changed Daniel’s medicine, and Daniel was looking better. He prescribed chemotherapy for Charity Dreher and said she might not lose the leg. Soon he was a frequent visitor at the Drehers, bringing back gallons of home brew. Nahum Scattergood built a shed out behind the hospital to house an expanded micro lab for the new strains. Isabel spent hours streaking plates and inoculating fermentation vats of the life-saving bacteria.
She finally got up the courage to ask Keith about the cancerous spots on her arm. At first he got very excited and insisted on a biopsy to make sure that it was not something worse. But it turned out to be just epithelioma after all, to be kept in check by burning them off once a year as Marguerite had prescribed.
Her father still treated Keith coolly, and Isabel wondered about this. “What do most transportees get sent for?” she asked Keith.
“Oh, anything from pickpocket to mass murder, depending on the town.”
“Why have we never got sent more than two?”
“Probably because you never send any. You’re one of the smaller Wall-towns. Most Wall-towns your size have gone quietly extinct since D-day. Beg yours,” he added, seeing her startled look. So that was what had become of the vanished towns: attrition through disease and crop failure. Her mother was right, they were in trouble for sure.
“How would we go about transporting someone?” asked Isabel.
“You leave a man chained outside the Pylon overnight. He’s gone in the morning.”
Isabel shuddered. “I can’t imagine doing that to anybody.”
Keith shrugged. “Some get sent out more than once. It’s one way the Underground spreads.” He paused, then added, “Not all of them end up on Earth, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“One fellow claimed he came back from a bizarre place where the universe doubled back on itself. Said he felt like a bloody lab rat.”
“You mean, the angelbees did experiments on him?”
“Something like that. Another fellow said he’d escaped during transport and managed to find his way to the Hive itself. One bomb could knock it out, he said, and all the Walls would vanish.”
So there was room for hope, then. Isabel redoubled her efforts to get Becca’s radio working. One day she actually managed to get sound out of the speakers, a crackling static that sounded the same across all channels. She was so excited that she ran upstairs immediately to show Keith. To her annoyance, he laughed, seeming less than impressed. “It’s Radio Free Gwynwood, all right. You’ll burst us out of our bubble, yet. When you do, I’ll take you back to Sydney and give you a tour of the Cross. We’ll watch the poofs at Les Girls.”
Undeterred, Isabel counted down the days till the next Sydney shipment, when the fetal monitor was due to arrive. Then she would have a radio frequency source to test her receiver.
In physics class, they were learning about black holes. Teacher Matthew said that if you could stand next to a black hole, you could look to the side and see the back of your own head, from light spiraling into the vortex of space-time like a marble spiraling down a funnel. Isabel grasped this right away, but Daniel and Jon looked puzzled. They would probably stop by later to get help from her. After class, Isabel stayed to ask Matthew about hypercharge.
“Hypercharge would be a force that acts something like gravity, only it would be repulsive, not attractive,” Matthew explained. “Its existence requires the assumption of an extra dimension, outside space and time.”
“Could it explain the pressure of an airwall?”
Matthew’s eyes rolled around, as they tended to do when he was thinking something through. “It is hard to guess what would generate such a force. But something must happen outside three-space, to account for the transfer of matter between two pylons.”
“Could the universe fold over on itself, in this extra dimension?”
“It could happen. It could work something like the black hole, although the forces would come out differently. Try this—” He pulled a book from his shelf, a Heinlein collection. “Here’s a story about getting trapped in an extra dimension.”
She read the title of the story, “And He Built a Crooked House.” “Thanks,” she said. “Five dimensions are bad enough, but the Herald says there are twenty-three dimensions.”
“That’s speculation. Physicists had such a theory, once, to account for the known particles. But all that work ceased on Doomsday.” Matthew looked away, and his hand toyed absently with a bit of chalk at the blackboard.
Then she recalled his sermon in the Meetinghouse, and she thought, If she did not ask him now, she never would. “Matthew, why did you say that in the Meetinghouse—I mean, the Church—about Doomsday?”
“What did I say?”
“You said we deserved what we got from the angelbees. You said that humans were not meant to have power over life and death, and that science only made things worse.”
For a moment Matthew eyed her keenly, then he shut his eyes and pressed his hands up over his face and wrinkled forehead. “At Alamogordo, the day before the first test of a nuclear device, Fermi calculated that the explosion might ignite the atmosphere, perhaps incinerating all life on Earth. His colleagues were furious; they recalculated, and the test went ahead.” He pointed his chalk at her. “For the first time in history, the world’s existence hung on a calculation. Should any mortal hold such power?”
“But science does lots of good things. Science cures illness. Should we go back to the Middle Ages, when they burned witches?”
“We almost did.” He smiled, but it was a tired smile. “I’m just a chemist, not a historian. As a scientist, I blame the scientists who built the bombs. As a historian, I would blame history, ‘the march of folly.’ As a Christian, I blame Christianity for its failure.” Her teacher’s eyes fixed hers with a sudden intensity. “Isabel, think of this. Let’s say those angelbees really did jam the radar on both sides with false signals, as we’ve been told. Suppose both sides had chosen not to respond?”
Matthew looked at her expectantly, but she found nothing to say. “If only somehow,” he added, “we humans had mastered the simple rule, ‘What is hurtful to thee, do not to thy neighbor.’ That’s all I should have said, Isabel.”
While physics was her best class, French was even worse than Isabel had expected. Not that it was hard, with her background in Spanish. The Little Prince was busy visiting little planets. Isabel had already figured out that the law of gravitation would rule out those little planets with their little volcanoes, but Teacher Debbie did not seem concerned about that. The third little planet the Little Prince visited was inhabited by a man surrounded by bottles, half of them full and half empty.
“Que fais-tu là?” the Little Prince asked.
“I drink,” said the man.
“Why do you drink?”
“To forget.”
“To forget what?”
“To forget that I am ashamed.”
“Ashamed of what?”
“Ashamed of drinking!”
Isabel decided that the author, like his protagonist, belonged in the category of Grace Feltman. She glanced surreptitiously at Daniel, whose head was buried in his book while Deliverance recited and translated for the class. Hidden behind her own book, she sign
ed the word for “stupid” to Peace Hope, knocking her S hand against her forehead. But Peace Hope ignored her. Peace Hope was insulted because Jon and Daniel always came to Isabel for help with physics homework, never to her, although she was nearly as good at it.
Isabel recalled the faded portraits of Helen Keller and John Dickinson in Teacher Becca’s schoolroom. She sighed and decided to be virtuous.
“You have to tell Jon you can’t keep coming over,” Isabel told Daniel after class. “It’s not fair. Tell him I’m too busy with the hospital extension. Peace Hope can help you both.”
“Why not tell him yourself,” Daniel suggested.
Isabel looked away. “It will hurt his feelings if I tell him.”
Daniel did not answer right away.
“It’s not my fault!” she burst out suddenly. “I can’t help it if I was born with arms and legs and not somebody else.”
At that Daniel actually cracked a smile and started to say something, but thought better of it. “I’ll talk to Jon.” As he left, Isabel felt mad at herself rather than virtuous; it was always that way with him.
Daniel was still keeping a vigil at the Pylon two or three nights a week. One night Isabel stopped to sit with him. The embroidered handkerchief was tucked in the bib of her overalls. From the trees surrounding the field came the insistent hum of cicadas. Twilight was deepening, but Daniel had not made a fire in the charred circle around the Pylon. “Like all walls, it was ambiguous, two-faced…” The angelbees came hovering just above their heads, turning their shiny black eyespots. Isabel thought she might just touch one, but they always managed to bob up out of reach. She consoled herself by scooping a late-summer firefly in her palm, where its bulbous abdomen came aglow with yellow light, then darkened again.
The light of fireflies was actually cold, she recalled. Their bodies emitted light at a well-defined wavelength, without the heat of incandescence. How would angelbees react to a “cold” light source? Would they be able to see it at all?
Daniel spoke quietly, yet it startled her, out of the stillness. “What do they fear about fire, I wonder. Is it just the physical danger? Surely that’s too simple.”
Isabel sighed. “Perhaps they’re just simpletons, like le Petit Prince.”
For such advanced creatures, angelbees had precious little room for brains. It made no sense, but then, nothing did. She felt Daniel’s nearness and wondered whether he would let her hold his hand. Tentatively she slipped her fingers across his, and she felt a gentle tug in return. She breathed in deeply.
Daniel said thoughtfully, “They don’t feel like ‘masters,’ do they…”
“They don’t put up with being shot.”
“…more like curious children.”
It occurred to her that the “punishment,” the three days of blinding fog, had come from the Pylon, not directly from the angelbees themselves. So had the “visions.”
Was it possible that the humans had yet to see their true masters?
Isabel was plucking squash from the garden one evening when she saw Liza dismount her horse and step briskly to the front door. The harvest had been better than expected, so far, with enough rain to save the squash and pumpkins, although the tomatoes had some kind of blight.
Liza seemed in a hurry. Was someone sick at the Scattergoods’? Isabel picked up her bucket of squash and returned to the house.
Liza was speaking with Isabel’s parents in the hallway, something about Becca. They turned, and the three of them faced Isabel, eyeing her oddly.
“Becca has disappeared,” Liza said. “Daniel found her Bible outside the Pylon, with the note inside.” She handed Isabel a slip of paper.
Isabel’s hand shook as she read. “Dear Ruth: They gave me eyes. All of you are beautiful; you shine like stars. But I must go away with them. I know you will not understand, but please forgive. I will try to return, but I can’t say when. Please give Isabel the candle box, and give Benjamin another kiss for me. Love, Becca.”
At first Isabel could not look up from the paper. Then her forehead was ringing, and cold seemed to reach to her toes.
“It’s not your doing, Isabel,” Liza was saying kindly. “This is…a shock to us all. But this box…we had a faint hope that you, perhaps, could tell us something.”
She forced her eyes to look up. Liza was holding an oblong wooden box, the one from which Becca had taken the candles, the day she had trapped the angelbee.
Isabel opened the box. It contained several tall white candles, plus assorted smaller ones, some down nearly to the base. There was a box of kitchen matches, and an old cameo pin. Beneath the candles was an object which she could not identify. Hexagonal in shape, slightly smaller than her palm, its black surface was rounded and shiny. At the center was a hole, about half an inch in diameter. She turned it over; the obverse was flat, like the backing of a cheap imitation stone, although the piece looked rather large for costume jewelry.
None of it held any message for her, that she could see. All she could think was, somehow, the catcher had been caught.
XI
THE TOWN WAS stunned. Death was an everyday reality, but this abrupt disappearance, with the mysterious intervention of the angelbees, was unheard of. Keith was as astonished as anyone, for in Sydney the angelbees kept a far greater distance from humans than they did in Gwynwood.
“Why is that?” Isabel insisted. “Why do they treat us differently from the City? You must tell us; you joined our Underground, remember?” She still suspected he knew a lot more than he was telling.
“Sorry, mate.” He gave her shoulder a pat. “Wish I could say more. Come to think of it though, primate watchers have always done the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, the Jane Goodall types. One tribe of chimps they’d feed bananas by hand; another lot they’d watch by hidden camera.”
Isabel thought this over, then froze again. “You think they took Becca to a zoo? Oh my God, no.” She turned away, unable to stop the tears anymore. She remembered all the questions Becca had asked, about the spacecraft replica, about the angelbees; if only she had guessed where it would lead.
“Now, you can’t think that.” Keith put his arm around her, the way her father did. “Look here: she chose to go, right? Maybe they took her to see the ‘Queen,’ eh?”
Liza called an emergency Town Meeting in the Meetinghouse.
“We’ve got to get her back,” said Marguerite. “She’s not well.” Becca’s card in the file listed an abdominal tumor, slow-growing, inoperable. Isabel winced and shut her eyes.
“How, that’s the problem,” murmured Carl, his voice subdued.
Anna said, “The circle of fire worked before.”
“But the note said she chose to go.” Ruth’s voice was shaking. “The note said they fixed her eyes. Maybe they promised to make her well, too.”
“Did she really write the note?” someone asked. “Did she know what she was doing?” There was the unspoken question, was Becca out of her senses; had “they” taken over her mind, somehow? Could it happen to others?
Ruth said, “The Pylon might explain to Alice.”
Liza nodded. “If she could go. If she could be brought, at the next new moon. Could it be done?” She turned to Marguerite.
“Yes,” the doctor said quietly. “If Alice’s condition is stable, it could be done.”
In the end, everyone offered support for Ruth and her son. Isabel promised to clean house and mind the bees twice a week. Daniel offered to take on Becca’s classes; since the children knew him from the Sunday class, it would ease the transition. He insisted his health could take the strain, with Keith’s new medicine. For the future, the Pestlethwaites let it be known they wouldn’t mind moving out of their own home, which needed an unaffordable roof job, to move in with Ruth. The move would make economic sense, saving firewood for the town as a whole. But the loss of yet another house was a chilling reminder of their population decline.
Afterward,
Peace Hope nudged Isabel. “The note didn’t say they fixed her eyes, it just said they gave her eyes. Maybe they gave her prosthetic eyes.”
Isabel blinked, then shook her head. “Who knows? Look, Scatterbrain, she must have left some kind of message in that box. I’ll bring it over, tonight, when it’s too dark for apple picking.”
Isabel sat on the carpet in Peace Hope’s bedroom. She picked the candles out, one by one. “No message that I can see.”
“Thee might not see it,” Peace Hope reminded her.
“Of course—she would have inscribed it, in Braille.” Isabel turned the candles over again, feeling them carefully with the tips of her fingers. Peace Hope took up a candle, rolling it against her cheek. But when all the candles were done, still they found nothing. Only the cameo and the odd hexagonal piece were left.
“The cameo was hers from Aaron,” Isabel said, “Ruth told me. The other piece Ruth didn’t recognize. She said Becca liked to collect odd bits of things.”
Peace Hope leaned over and stared at the hexagonal piece. “I’m sure I’ve seen something like that before. Would thee please fetch my sketch pad?”
Isabel grabbed the sketch pad and flipped through the first couple of pages. There were sketches of the Pylon, from their first visit, and sketches of angelbees. One large angelbee had a daughter cell budding off; the eyespot of the parent had a flat hexagonal facet, as if a slice had been cut off. The pupil of the eye was a hole right at the center of the facet. “That’s it!” Isabel shouted. “This piece would fit right into the eyespot of an angelbee, hole and all.” She picked up the object and poked her finger through its hole.
“Let me see.”
Isabel passed it to her. Peace Hope sat against her bed, holding the piece between her grippers.
“It has to be, don’t you think?” Isabel sat on the floor, arms clasped around her legs, chin resting on one knee. “It must have fallen off the eyespot, like a discarded bit of insect shell.”
Peace Hope studied the object. “Or it could be one of those hex scales from the spaceship. They were about that size.”
The Wall Around Eden Page 9