The Fence

I stopped sleeping in the cottage after the dream of the cougar's hands. I did not tell anyone this. I moved my pillow to the mess hall, where the lights stayed on all night, and I slept in fits, with my back to a wall, the way I had learned to sleep in the life raft. Corbett found me there on the sixth morning and did not ask why, which was answer enough.

That was the day the fence stopped being a wall and became a question.

I had been walking the compound for two days, up and down the graded roads, past the shed and the pen and the administration block, and I had noticed that the fence was not one thing but two. There was the outer fence, the ten-foot mesh that ran from the jetty around the interior, and there was an inner fence, lower, five feet, that divided the interior into two halves. The village I had walked through sat inside the outer fence. Beyond the inner fence lay the deep scrub and the eucalyptus ridges and, somewhere past them, the sea cliffs on the far side of the island. I had not seen anything cross the inner fence. I had not seen anything try.

On the sixth morning I climbed the ridge behind the Station, where a water tank stood, and I looked down at the island the way the Warden must look at it, and I understood what the two fences made. The island was three rooms. There was the Station, the white compound where the boat came and went. There was the village, where the Kindred lived by the Code, close enough to be watched and fed. And there was the deep interior, the scrub and the ridges, where nothing lived that the Warden could not afford to lose. The inner fence was not for keeping anything in. It was for keeping the village from knowing what was beyond it.

I went down from the tank and through the outer gate, and I walked the village path, and the village was quieter than it had been the first time. The yard was empty. The huts were shut. Only the woman with the muzzle stood in the middle of the yard, and she did not recite the Code. She stood with her head down, and when I came close she raised it, and her eyes were the cougar's eyes, and they were full of something I could not name, and I understood, without being told, that they had all been made to stand in that yard and watch the gate where I had walked in, and that what they had been made to feel about me was not decided yet.

"She has not spoken since the Warden came," said a voice, and I turned, and the Shambler was there, at the edge of the yard, with the low fast thing at his feet. "The Warden came to the village in the night, new man, and he asked who had taught you the Code, and she said no one taught it, you spoke it. And the Warden said the Code is not for speaking, it is for keeping. And then he left."

"Why would he care if I spoke the Code?"

The Shambler looked at me for a long time, and I saw, in his gray-brown face, the exact machinery of a mind trying to decide how much truth a man can carry.

"Because the Code is what keeps us," he said. "And the Warden is afraid, new man, that if a man can keep the Code, then the Code is not what keeps us. It is only what we are told. And if that is true, then we are not made. We are only told. And if we are only told, then the Warden is not a maker. He is a teller. And a teller can be answered."

I stood in the yard with the woman's eyes on me and the Shambler's words in me, and I understood that I had done a thing on the island without knowing it: I had stood among them and answered their prayer, and the answer had gone through the village like a wire, and the Warden had felt the other end of it.

"What is beyond the inner fence?" I asked.

The Shambler's face did something that was not a smile. "Beyond the inner fence is where the ones who cannot keep the Code go. The Warden does not bring them back. Sometimes we hear them. They do not say the Code there. They say nothing." He paused. "There is a gate in the inner fence, new man. It is not locked. The Warden leaves it open, and he leaves food on our side of it, and he does not watch it, because the ones who go through it do not come back, and the ones who stay learn why."

I looked at the inner fence, running low and black through the scrub, and I looked at the woman, and I looked at the Shambler, and I asked the question that I had been carrying since the night on the road outside the shed.

"What does he make them into?"

The Shambler did not answer. He looked at the inner fence, and the look was the longest look I had seen on any face on that island, and then he said, "The same thing he makes everything into, new man. Himself. Over and over. The Warden is making a world with only one kind of thing in it, and it is his kind, and the fence is not to keep the world out. The fence is to keep the world from seeing how small his world is."

He went back into the trees then, and the low fast thing went with him, and I stood in the yard with the woman and did not know which of us was keeping the other's Code.