Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  A simulacrum, unarmed and asking for a conversation . . . "Still, Ris. You shouldn't have come here."

  "I'm not finished. The thing is, Leo idolizes his father. They've stayed in close contact. Everyone who knows Leo figures he's on the way to join Werner, maybe help Werner conduct what ever paranoid project he has in mind."

  "Maybe so, but—"

  "Just listen. Apart from his son, Werner Beck keeps his distance from survivor families. He writes occasionally, he sends money, he supplies us with fake ID on a regular basis, but none of that comes with a return address. But you're a full- fledged Society insider and you were always one of his favorites— you must know how to contact him. And if you do know, you have to tell me where he is, because we have to go there. We have to go there, Ethan. We have to go there and get Cassie and take her home."

  She sat back in her chair and swiped her hair away from her eyes with a flick of her left hand, a gesture he had forgotten but which was instantly familiar.

  "Ris . . . the situation is more complicated than you might think."

  She looked at him impatiently.

  "I had a visitor, too," he said.

  It was the survivors of '07 who had coined the word "simulacrum" to describe their attackers. In his monographs Werner Beck sometimes called them "myrmidons." The reference was to Ovid's Metamorphosis, a passage in which Zeus turns ants into human beings in order to repopulate the country of Aegina. Ethan appreciated the insect reference, and as a literary scholar Nerissa would have recognized the allusion— but no one else did; simulacrum (or sim) had become the accepted word.

  He told Nerissa as concisely as possible about the sim in the cellar, how it had shown up on his doorstep and what it had asked for and what it had offered him in return. She listened with careful attention and seemed surprised but not shocked until he got to the part about shooting it in the leg: "You really did that?"

  "I had to be sure it wasn't human. Is that hard to understand?"

  "No, it's just— I remember how you always hated guns."

  He still did. To Ethan, holding a firearm felt like assuming a responsibility no sane human being should want to accept. But after moving into the farm house he had signed up for a target and safety course at a shooting range outside of Jacobstown, where he discovered he had a modest talent for marksmanship. He had grown accustomed to the heft of the pistol in his hand in the same way he had grown inured to the shooting- range stink of raw plywood and scorched steel. Hunting deer with a long gun had been a more difficult act to stomach. The act of killing sickened him. But he had hardened himself to that, too. "It's been a few years. I learned some things."

  "I'm sorry. Go on. What did the sim say?"

  "It mentioned Cassie—"

  "What—it knew her name? My God, why didn't you tell me this?"

  "I am telling you."

  "Jesus, Ethan!" She stood up, nearly knocking over her chair. "And the thing is still alive?"

  "Yeah, but—"

  "I need to talk to it."

  "Ris, it can't tell the truth— it can't distinguish between truth and lies. You know that. It uses words to manipulate people."

  "Yes, that was your theory, wasn't it? Yours and Werner Beck's."

  "It's how the hypercolony works."

  "But it might be telling the truth."

  "If we try to interrogate it, we're only giving it an opportunity to manipulate us."

  "So why haven't you killed it?"

  Good question. Because it has a human- seeming face? Because I'm as easy to manipulate as anyone else? "I was about to do that when you drove up."

  "I still want to talk to it."

  "Ris—"

  "Now! We can't afford to waste time."

  Of course they could not. He led her to the windowless cellar.

  7

  ON THE ROAD

  THAT FIRST NIGHT, LEO DICTATED WHERE everyone would sleep. He insisted that Cassie and Beth share the double bed, which they did, though Beth was ungracious about it. The cheap sofa pushed against the wall of the motel room was big enough for Thomas, who curled up with a spare sweater for a pillow and Cassie's winter coat for a blanket. He fell asleep instantly. Leo insisted on sleeping on the floor. It was a silly gallantry— there was room in the bed for three— but Cassie guessed it was a well- intended gesture.

  The next two days were slow repetitions of their first day on the road. Leo bought a Rand- McNally road map and calculated a route he called "indirect," a drunkard's walk on two- lane blacktop, meant to confuse anyone who might have followed them from Buffalo. And it was Leo who did most of the driving, though Cassie took the wheel for an hour or two each day and Beth did the same. They ate at roadside diners or small- town restaurants. It seemed to Cassie that they passed through dozens of identical towns, a town where every river met a creek, and in each one she was tempted to get out of the car, take Thomas to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket for some destination she could barely envision— Terra Haute, Cincinnati, Wheeling: a place where she could be nobody in particular, a place where she would never have to think of the Correspondence Society.

  But that was a fantasy, and Cassie was quick to dismiss it. After a day on the road, and a second, and a third, bitter reality set in. Beth and Leo were both dealing with the possibility that they had been orphaned: Beth had seen the stretcher being carried from her father's building, and Leo was driving toward what might well turn out to be a murder scene. Cassie was already an orphan (a word she despised), but now she might have lost Aunt Ris and should probably assume she had. On the second day of their road trip Leo stopped at a diner that sold newspapers from across the country, The New York Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Buffalo News. Cassie picked up the News and scanned it, but there was nothing about any murders; the Liberty Street accident had gone unreported and she found no familiar names in the obituary columns. But that proved nothing. Nothing at all.

  All we have, she thought, is each other. Leo and Beth, Cassie and Thomas. What bound them together was uncertainty and dread. And guilt— especially after the third day, the day they bloodied their hands.

  It started with Leo's paranoia and a confession from Beth.

  Cassie failed to notice anything amiss until they pulled out of the parking lot of the motel where they had spent the night. She had slept badly and so had Thomas. During her wakeful moments, which seemed to arrive every half hour or so, she had seen her little brother tossing restlessly or lying passively awake, his eyes scanning the moonlit borders of the room. So far Thomas had been almost inhumanly patient, seldom complaining even when he was hungry or tired. But maybe that wasn't a good thing. It might be a symptom of emotional shock. This morning his eyes were red and bruised- looking, and he refused breakfast— a granola bar and a bottle of orange juice— when she offered it to him. Today would be different, she told him. Today, Leo had said, they were going to get back on the Interstate and head directly for the place where Werner Beck lived. No more meandering back roads. But Thomas only shrugged.

  Leo was almost as quiet as he drove from the motel lot onto the two- lane county road. From where she sat all Cassie could see of Leo him was the back of his head and his reflection in the rearview mirror. He kept glancing at the mirror and at Beth beside him as the road unreeled under trees with branches like outstretched fingers and a sky as flat as tinted glass.

  After a while he broke the silence: "Any of you notice a guy in a dark suit, big glasses, old- fashioned hat?"

  "Notice him where?" Cassie asked.

  "Anywhere we stopped— restaurants, motels?"

  Cassie hadn't noticed anyone like that. Beth shook her head. Thomas ignored the question and gazed indifferently out the side window.

  "Because he was in the lobby when I was checking out," Leo said. "And he looked kind of familiar. I thought maybe . . . I don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter."

  "You think we might have been followed?"

  Leo frowned. Cassie had come to appreciat
e that frown, the way it bracketed his mouth. Back in Buffalo, among survivors, she had seen him escalate trivial arguments to the point of shouting, a quality she hated in him. But out here on the road Leo had shown a more thoughtful side. The frown signaled a mood more quizzical than angry. "It's possible," he said. "We have to be careful, right?"

  "Yeah," she said. "Always. Of course." But she honestly didn't remember a guy with big glasses and a hat.

  Twenty minutes later Leo glanced at the mirror and cursed. Cassie craned her head to check the road: there was a car behind them, far enough away that it disappeared when the road curved and reappeared when it straightened. A midnight- blue car, high- tailed and salted with road dust. It looked like it might be a few years old, though Cassie didn't know about cars and couldn't name the make or model. "Same as yesterday," Leo muttered.

  "You've seen that car before?"

  "Or one just like it. Fuck!"

  "So pull over," Beth suggested. "Pull over and let it pass."

  Leo waited until they reached a gas station, a little two- pump depot where he could idle inconspicuously for a couple of minutes. Cassie and Thomas hunkered down, but Cassie kept her head high enough to see the car as it went by. It didn't slow. It didn't speed up. It just whooshed past, neatly centered in the right lane. There was a single driver at the wheel: a middle- aged man wearing oversized eyeglasses and a dowdy, old- fashioned hat.

  They sat for ten more minutes before Leo pulled out of the gas station, grit crackling under the tires as he steered back onto the road. He said, "It's possible we've been discovered. So don't take offence, but I have to ask: did either of you— or Thomas— maybe try to call home, find out what happened back in Buffalo?"

  In truth, Cassie had been tempted. In every room they stayed in, every restaurant where they ate, there had been a telephone in plain sight. She was always just one call away from knowing whether Aunt Ris had lived or died. So yeah, it was a constant irrational temptation, like putting poisoned food on a plate in front of a hungry person. But she wasn't stupid enough to dig in. "No," she said.

  "Thomas? How about you?"

  The question seemed to startle him. "What?"

  "Call anybody on the phone lately?"

  "No! Not since we left."

  "Are you sure about that? It's okay to tell me. I'm not pissed or anything. I just need to know, right?"

  "Right," Thomas said uncertainly.

  "So did you call somebody, talk to somebody?"

  "No. But she did."

  She—Beth.

  "Fucking little liar!" Beth said promptly.

  "I saw her."

  "Nobody cares what you think you saw!"

  Leo took his right hand off the wheel and put it on Beth's thigh, to reassure her or to keep her quiet, Cassie couldn't tell which. "When was this?"

  Thomas gave Cassie a questioning look.

  "Go on," she said quietly. "Tell him. It's okay."

  "At the motel. Two nights ago."

  "In the room?"

  "After dinner. Outside. She was at a phone booth."

  "I was having a smoke," Beth said. "Come on, Leo, this is bullshit!"

  "You saw her use the phone?"

  Thomas hesitated before he spoke. "I don't know. I thought so. I was looking through the window. It was kind of dark. But it looked like she picked up the phone."

  "I was in the phone booth," Beth said, "having a fucking smoke, all right?"

  The car rolled on, silent apart from the growl of the engine and the asthmatic murmur of the heater. "I'm not passing judgment on anybody," Leo said. "I just need to know. I mean, it wasn't snowing or raining— you needed to go into a phone booth to have a smoke?"

  After a longer and even weightier silence Beth said, "I never actually talked to anybody!"

  "Okay, I guess I understand that. But you called?"

  "I just thought . . . I'm talking about my father . . . if he picked up, at least I'd know he wasn't dead."

  "Okay. And . . . did he?"

  "Did he what?"

  "Answer."

  "Oh. Well— no."

  "Uh- huh."

  Beth bit her lip and stared out the window. "I'm sorry. It was stupid. I know that. It won't happen again."

  "Yeah, good." Leo took his hand off her leg. "See that it doesn't."

  The road curved through hilly, wooded land toward the Interstate. A few weeks ago, Cassie thought, the hills would have been gaudy with autumn colors, but November had stripped all the trees and burned the meadows brown.

  Leo pulled off at a roadside stop, a gravel parking lot and a pair of cinderblock restrooms overlooking a broad valley. Away and below, a river stitched a quilt of forested allotments and freehold farms. The river must have a name, Cassie thought, but she didn't know what it was. A pair of turkey buzzards drew circles in the cloudless sky.

  Cassie and Thomas left the car, ostensibly to look at the view, really to let Leo and Beth talk in private.

  Cassie had never been close to Beth but she felt sorry for her now. For more than a year, at gatherings of survivor families, Cassie had watched Beth deliberately and systematicallyingratiate herself with Leo, repeating his opinions as if she had always shared them, smiling when he smiled and sneering at what ever he disliked. Her hostility toward her father, her impatience with the timid and cloistered survivor world, even her raggedy- cuff Levi's and thrift- shop costume jewelry, all had been calculated to capture Leo's sympathy. And Leo had happily bought the act, much to Cassie's disgust.

  But a few days on the road had fractured Beth's pretensions. Maybe Beth had resented her father, but she had cared enough about him to risk a phone call. And as stupid as that act may have been, Cassie understood it and sympathized with it.

  "I wish we could just go home." Thomas tossed a pebble and listened as it bounced down the slope toward the valley. He leaned over the plastic mesh fence meant to keep tourists from falling and hurting themselves. Not that there were any tourists this time of year.

  "Yeah, I know," Cassie said. "So do I."

  "So when do you think we'll actually live somewhere?"

  "It might take time. Try to patient, okay?"

  Thomas nodded. Of course, he had already been heroically patient. "I think Beth hates us."

  "She acts like it. But really she's just scared."

  "So? I'm scared too. That doesn't mean I have to behave like an asshole."

  Cassie laughed. "You have a point there."

  Was she underestimating Thomas, treating him too much like a child? When Cassie was Thomas's age she had dreamed of joining the Youth Corps, the branch of the League that sent young people to monitor elections in remote countries where new parliaments were being formed. She had pictured herself defending ballot boxes from marauding bandits (which of course Corps volunteers never really did). The murder of her parents had driven all such thoughts from her mind. Was it possible Thomas harbored some similar ambition? Could he, after all that had happened?

  She was tempted to ask him. But before she could speak Thomas turned up his face, frowning and attentive. "Car coming," he said.

  Cassie heard it a second later. She turned apprehensively, spooked by everything Leo had said. To her dismay, the car pulled into the scenic overlook and parked in a spot next to the restrooms. It was the car Leo said had been following them, or a close match. The driver's-side door opened. A middle- aged man got out, stretching and massaging the small of his back. He wore big glasses and an old- fashioned hat.

  The man who may or may not have been following them walked into the men's restroom. Cassie and Thomas scrambled back to the car. Leo and Beth got out, and Leo opened the trunk and began rummaging for something in one of his bags. He was tense and his arms moved jerkily. When he stood away from the bumper Cassie saw that he had found what he was looking for, a handgun.

  That Leo carried a pistol was no surprise. His father would have encouraged him to keep one, might even have helped him acquire it, legally or illegally. But sh
e was dismayed to see him holding it. It suggested possibilities she didn't care to think about. Even Leo seemed intimidated by it. The weapon trembled in his hand.

  He meant to confront the man, Cassie realized, and she could tell by his expression that there would be no arguing about it. Wisely or not, Leo would do this. She could only watch. Or help.

  If he had a plan he didn't stop to discuss it. Cassie, Thomas and Beth crouched behind the car while Leo posted himself outside the restroom door and made a shushing gesture, finger to lips. Cassie looked at Thomas, who had gone so bug- eyed she was afraid he might panic, but he held his body motionless and kept his mouth firmly closed. Was there some way to protect him? The man with the big glasses might be armed, too, if he was a sim. But there was nowhere better to hide than here, unless she wanted to tumble down the slope of the hill or run across the road to a stand of trees. Minutes passed, and Cassie became acutely aware of the cold air, the sun on her shoulders, the oily smell of the car and the beating of her heart. At last the crude wooden door of the restroom swung open and the man with the hat stepped out, blinking in the afternoon light. Belatedly, he registered the presence of Leo and offered a squinty, quizzical smile.