Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She could leave a note, of course, but even then she would have to be careful what she said.

  She took her knapsack from the closet in the hallway and filled it with simple food from the kitchen cupboard: a half- dozen trail- mix bars, apple juice in single- serving boxes, a foil bag of mixed nuts and raisins. On impulse she grabbed a book from the shelf in the hallway and tucked it into a side pocket. It was a book her uncle had written: The Fisherman and the Spider, a tattered paperback edition Cassie had read twice before.

  Time was passing. She strapped her watch to her wrist and saw that almost twenty minutes had slipped by since the death of the sim. The police were in the street now. Whirling red lights blinked through the window blinds. She guessed the police officers would be bewildered by the corpse of the victim— as much of it as hadn't already evaporated into the night air. And the city coroner, tasked with analyzing the remains, might end up questioning his own sanity. But no report would be published in the morning papers. The sobbing, drunken driver would never come to trial. That was a foregone conclusion.

  Cassie took a pen and a sheet of paper into the kitchen and controlled the trembling of her hand long enough to write,

  Aunt Ris,

  Gotta run— you know why.

  Just wanted to say thanks (for everything). I will take good care of Thomas.

  Love to you always,

  Cassie

  It would have been dangerous to say more, and her aunt would understand the shorthand—"gotta run" was their personal Code Red. But it wasn't enough, it wasn't nearly enough. How could it be? For seven years Aunt Ris had looked after Cassie and Thomas with kindness, patience and— well, if not love, at least something like love. It was Aunt Ris who had calmed Cassie's night terrors after the death of her parents, Aunt Ris who had gently introduced her to the truth about the Correspondence Society. And if she had been a little more protective than Cassie would have liked, Aunt Ris had also helped her strike a balance between the world as it appeared and the world as it really was— between the world as Cassie had loved it and the world she had come to dread.

  "Thanks" was hardly adequate. She hesitated, wanting to say more. But if she tried to do so she would have to fight back tears, and that wasn't helpful right now. So she taped the note, unaltered and inelegant as it was, to the refrigerator door, and forced her attention to the necessities of the moment.

  Finally, she tiptoed into Thomas's room and woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

  She envied her younger brother's aptitude for sleep. Thomas slept deeply, silently and reliably. His small bedroom was tidy at the moment. Thomas's toys sat neatly on a wooden shelf, his clothes hung freshly- laundered in the closet. Thomas himself lay on his back with the comforter up to his chin, as if he hadn't moved since Cassie tucked him in a few hours ago. Maybe he hadn't. Twelve years old, but his face had kept its childhood roundness; his blond hair, even in disarray, made him look like a fat angel in yellow jammies. He woke as if he were returning to his body after a long absence. "Cassie," he croaked, blinking at her. "What's wrong?"

  She told him to get dressed and get his suitcase from under the bed. They had to leave, she said. Now.

  Dazed as he was, the implication wasn't lost on him. "Aunt Ris—" he began.

  "She's not home. We have to leave without her."

  She hated the anxiety that surged from his eyes and felt reproached by it. She wanted to say, It's not my fault! Don't blame me— I don't have a choice!

  Worse, perhaps, was the look of frightened resignation that followed. Thomas was too young to remember much about the murder of their parents. But what he did remember, he remembered with his body as much as his mind. He sat up and steadied himself with a hand on the edge of the mattress. "Where are we going?"

  "To see Leo Beck. After that— we'll figure it out. Now get dressed. Hurry! You know the drill. And dress warm, okay?"

  He nodded and stood up straight, like a soldier at reveille. The sight of him made her want to cry.

  The high window at the end of the hallway opened onto a wooden fire escape bolted to the building's sooty brickwork. The stairs descended into the alley behind the building, which meant that Cassie and Thomas, climbing down, would be invisible to the police, who in any case were probably too busy sorting out the events on Liberty Street to worry about what was happening in a vacant back lane.

  As she raised the window Cassie caught a reflection of herself in the dusty glass. A young woman, dowdy in an oversized sweater, wary eyes peering out from under a black woolen watch cap— mouth too big, eyebrows too darkly generous, unattractive in what Cassie considered the best sense: she would never be stared at for her looks, which suited her fine.

  In high school she had been considered not just odd- looking but personally odd. She had heard boys calling her "dead fish" behind her back. And it was true that she had become expert at concealing her feelings. That was part of what it meant to be a Society kid. There were truths you could never acknowledge, feelings that had to stay hidden. So it was okay to be a dead fish, to stand outside the hallway alliances and weekend social circles, to be looked at sidelong as you walked from class to class. Even to be sneered at, if you couldn't avoid it. Her slightly geeky looks were helpful in that respect, a useful barrier between herself and others. She knew how to fly under the radar: never volunteer an answer, never expect or demand real friendship, do your work well but not conspicuously well.

  In the presence of other Society offspring she could let her hair down a little. But she had never really enjoyed the company of that crowd, either. Society brats tended to be gnarly, cliquish, complexly screwed-up. Herself most certainly included.

  She bit her lip and took a deep breath. Then she clambered over the low sill onto the wooden stairs, lifted out her suitcase and Thomas's, and helped Thomas climb out behind her. The weather- worn wooden platform lurched under their combined weight. The alley below was a brick- lined asphalt corridor, empty of everything but a solitary Dumpster and the fitful November wind. That suited her, too.

  She tried not to think about what she was leaving behind. When they reached ground level she gripped Thomas's hand in hers ("Ow," he said) and led him through the alley to the corner where it opened onto Pippin Street. Then she turned left, heading for the home of the disagreeable Leo Beck and a future she was afraid even to imagine.

  2

  RURAL VERMONT

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, NOT LONG AFTER the first sunlight touched the barren branches of the maple trees and began to burn the skin of frost out of the shadows, a man approached Ethan Iverson's farm house. The man was alone and walked slowly, which meant Ethan had plenty of warning.

  Ethan watched the stranger's progress on a video screen in the attic room in which he kept his typewriter, his Correspondence Society files and a small arsenal of firearms. He had been in the kitchen when the alarm sounded, preparing his standard breakfast of eggs and ham fried in an iron skillet. Now the meal was going cold on the stovetop downstairs, the eggs congealing in grease.

  Ethan had lived alone in the farm house for seven years— seven years and three months now. Entire weeks passed when he spoke to no one but the check- out girl at Kierson's Grocery and the counter clerk at Back Pages Books, his two inevitable stops whenever he drove into Jacobstown for supplies. One useful device by which a solitary man could keep touch with sanity, he had discovered, was a regular schedule, strictly obeyed. Every night he set his alarm clock for seven o'clock, every morning he showered and dressed and finished breakfast by eight, regardless of the day of the week or the season of the year. Just as meticulously, he was careful to maintain and keep in good repair the array of motion detectors and video cameras he had installed on the property not long after he moved in.

  For seven years, that system had registered nothing but a few stray hunters and mushroom pickers, a religious pamphleteer who believed God had granted him an exemption from the many and conspicuous NO TRESPASSING signs on the property, one d
etermined census taker, and on two occasions a member of the family of black bears that lived beyond the western boundary of Ethan's property. Every time the alarm sounded Ethan had hurried up to this attic room, where he could see the intruder on his video monitor and evaluate the possible threat. Every time— until now— the intruder had proved to be essentially harmless.

  He switched the monitor to a new camera as the man walked up the unpaved access road toward the house at a steady pace. The man Ethan saw on the monitor seemed surpassingly ordinary, though a little out of place. He was probably not older than twenty- five, bare- headed and brown- haired and twenty pounds overweight, dressed like a city dweller in a drab overcoat and black shoes that had surrendered their shine to the moist clay of the road. From his looks he could have been a real- estate agent, come to ask whether Ethan had considered putting the property up for sale. But Ethan was fairly sure the guy wasn't even human.

  Of course, the man's physical appearance meant nothing. (Unless the very blandness of him could be construed as a strategic choice.) What tipped Ethan off— what was, perhaps, meant to tip Ethan off— was the way the stranger gazed at each camera lens as he passed it, as if he knew he was being observed and didn't care, as if he wanted Ethan to know he was coming.

  As the man approached the thousand- yard mark, Ethan considered his choice of weapons.

  He kept a small armory up here. Mostly hunting rifles, since those could be acquired easily and legally, but including a couple of military- style handguns. In the rack by the window he kept a fully- loaded Remington moose rifle with a German scope, and he had trained himself in its use well enough that he could easily pick off the invader at this distance with a single shot from the attic's small window. The peculiar anatomy of the simulacra made them less susceptible to injury than human beings, of course, but they were far from invulnerable. A well- placed head shot would do the trick.

  Ethan thought about that. It would be the simplest way to handle the situation. Pick off the invader, then pack a bag and leave. Because if the hypercolony had located him, it would be suicidal to stay. If he killed one sim, more would come.

  . . . if he was sure this man was a sim. Was he sure?

  Well, his instinct was pretty strong. If he had to bet, he'd have put money on it. But he couldn't trust a man's life to instinct.

  He eyed the long gun wistfully but let it be. Instead he picked out a shotgun and a device that looked like a stocky pistol but was built to deliver 300 kilovolts from a pair of copper prongs. His research had led him to believe the latter would an effective short- range weapon against a simulacrum but probably not lethal to a human being. He had not, however, tested this theory.

  He watched the monitor a moment longer, trying to shake off his fear. He had known this day might come. He had planned for it; it had played out in his imagination a thousand times. So why were his hands shaking? But the answer was so obvious he didn't have to frame it. His hands were shaking because, despite all the precautions he had taken, despite his superior firepower and his carefully calculated avenues of escape, what was approaching the house might be one of the creatures who had already taken the lives of too many of Ethan's friends and family— a thing neither human nor self- aware, as casually lethal as a bolt of lightning.

  He tucked the shock pistol into his belt and made sure the shotgun was loaded. He put a pair of extra shells in his shirt pocket. He felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder, but there wasn't time.

  Death came up the creaking porch stair and politely rang the doorbell. Ethan went down to answer.

  The green- on- the- inside men (and women: Ethan reminded himself that some of them were women) had already cost him his marriage and his career. They had achieved that remarkable feat over the course of a single day in 2007.

  On that day Ethan had been a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, author of several well- received journal papers and a couple of reasonably successful popular- science books, an asset to his department and an active researcher who could command a cadre of undergraduate students. His specialty was entomology but lately his research had taken him into the field of paleobotany, the study of ancient plant life; he had joined a team of researchers who were isolating airborne spores from ten-thousand-year-old Antarctic ice cores. He was also engaged in a more clandestine sort of research— the kind that interested the Correspondence Society.

  The members of the Correspondence Society were scientists and scholars, but they never published their findings in peer- reviewed journals. The Society was known only to itself, and its members were sworn to secrecy. As a grad student Ethan had been introduced to the Society by his mentor at MIT, a man whose mind and ethics Ethan had admired without reserve. Even so, Ethan had been skeptical at first. The Society had sounded like something eccentric and deeply old- fashioned, a survival of some Edwardian dons' club that had once flourished in the cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge. He would have dismissed it as a joke— a frankly preposterous joke— if not for the names associated with it. Mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, many with impressive pedigrees, and the roster of the dead was even more impressive, if true: Dirac, von Neumann, Fermi . . .

  He had been warned of the risks he would be running if he agreed to ally himself with the group. The rules were stringent. Members could communicate about Society business only by mail or face- to- face. People who spoke about the Society too publically faced reprisals, not from the Society itself but from sources unknown. If he said the wrong thing to the wrong person Ethan might begin to find his research proposals rejected without cause, might fall out of favor with academic and peer review committees, might lose tenure. He understood these risks, and once he joined the Society he had been scrupulously careful. But no one had warned him that he might be killed. That his family might be put at risk of their lives.

  Ethan had survived the massacre of June 2007 purely by accident. He had been recruited as a last- minute delegate to the annual ESA Conference, and he was at Logan Airport waiting for a flight to Phoenix when the first reports flashed across the TV in the boarding- area lounge. His attention was drawn by the photographs alternating on the screen— chillingly, all of them people he knew. Benson at Yale, Kammerov at Cornell, Neiderman at Edinburgh, Linde at Saint Petersburg. And more, a dozen in all. The caption under the newscast said UNIVERSITY MURDERS. Ethan moved closer to the screen, already sick with dread; the volume was turned low, but he heard enough of the newscaster's murmuring to confirm his fears. There is no conclusive evidence linking the various murders which took place on three continents this Wednesday, but it seems more than coincidental that so many well- known academics and scholars should die violently in such a short period of time . . . Local authorities are cooperating with the police arm of the League of Nations to determine whether the deaths are part of a larger pattern . . .

  The news must just have made the wire services. The Asian and European killings had happened overnight; the American murders were only hours old. And Ethan didn't need the help of the League of Nations to recognize "a larger pattern." All of the named victims had been members of the Correspondence Society.

  He found a pay phone and placed a call to his office in Amherst. The Society had taught him to distrust telephones— even local calls were routinely bounced through the radiosphere, part of the global telecom radio- relay system— but he hoped a quick call wouldn't at tract undue attention. The business- class boarding announcement for his Phoenix flight came while he was dialing; he ignored it.

  Amy Winslow, Ethan's office assistant, answered after three rings. "Professor Iverson! Are you okay?"

  He kept his voice carefully neutral and told her he was fine. Before he could say anything more, she asked whether he was in Phoenix yet or whether he could come right back to the office. It was terrible, she said. Tommy Chopra had been shot! Shot and killed! A janitor found him dead! The police were everywhere, talking to people, collecting evidence!

  Ethan
couldn't disguise his shock. Tommy Chopra was one of his grad students. Tommy was an early riser and a compulsive perfectionist; Ethan had given him a key to his office and Tommy was often there before sunrise, compiling data while the rest of the campus was just flickering to life. According to Amy, he had been shot and killed sometime before seven this morning. No one had seen his assailant.

  But it wasn't Tommy they meant to kill. It was me.

  "Can you come back and talk to the police?"

  "Of course. In the meantime, call the conference and tell them I had to cancel. The number's in the literature on my desk. I'll be right in."

  It was a deliberate lie. Ethan didn't mean to go anywhere near his office, not that day or ever again.

  Instead he drove for two hours directly to the South Amherst apartment where Nerissa had been staying during their "trial separation," as she liked to call their rehearsal for divorce. He had agreed not to drop in unannounced, but circumstances overruled that polite agreement. He understood very little about what happened to the Society, but his next move was obvious. He needed to tell her what had happened, why this might be the last time she would see him, and what she had to do next.