Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  We were off behind the depot buildings in the shade, sharing a smoke where the crew boss wouldn't see us. I said, Well, what's an alicanto?

  It's a bird, he says. It's got metal wings and it lives in caves and eats gold and silver. Its wings light up at night, all different colors.

  Bullshit, I say.

  Yeah, obviously, Bastián says. Or no, not bullshit exactly but a myth. A legend. The alicanto's good luck for miners. Follow it to find silver or gold. But if it sees you, it leads you nowhere. It lets you die in the desert.

  I'm no miner, I tell him. And I don't believe in any fucking alicanto.

  Fair enough, he says. I don't believe in your light.

  So I told him, next time I saw it I'd wake him up and show him.

  But we got pretty busy about then. There were big shipments coming through. How it worked was, goods were trucked in from the railhead. Some of it was food but most of it was hardware. Electronics: integrated circuits, transformers, microwave generators. And some large- scale stuff. Machines for working metal. Aluminum parts. Tubes and piping. Crates listed on the manifest as powdered silicon carbide. Pressurized hydrogen. Mirrors, huge ones. Graphite. I mean, what the fuck? I'm no expert, but why does a copper mine need mirrors and graphite?

  And it was a strange arrangement all around. These shipments were delivered from the Ferrocarril and the crates would sit in our store house for a couple of days, then a fleet of trucks would come down the road from the east and we'd load 'em up. It made no sense. Why not just deliver it all straight to the mine? Also, the guys who drove those trucks— copper miners, supposedly— never talked to us. They'd nod if you said hello, but they were all about their manifests. They didn't socialize. They never even stepped out back of the shed for a smoke— none of them smoked. Guys in white shirts and jeans, neat and clean as fucking Mormons. Eyes on the clipboard at all times.

  What I figured out was that we were there to sanitize their operation. You know what I mean? So nobody from outside ever got to see the mine. What ever they did there was always out of sight, over the horizon. We were as close as anybody was allowed to get— and all we ever saw were these guys in their unmarked trucks.

  Which made me curious.

  Bastián, not so much. It was just a job to him, he didn't give a fuck how the mine worked. Not until one night, one of those nights without a breeze of any kind, I woke up, it might have been three or four in the morning, I couldn't sleep, so I stepped out of the bunk house to get some air, cold as it gets at night even in summer in the Atacama, and the light was shining again, like a candle on the horizon. So I went and woke up Bastián. There, I told him. See? There's your goddamn alicanto.

  I don't know what that is, Bastián says, serious for once. Maybe some kind of smelter they're running. But he knew better than that.

  I could tell he was curious. We talked it over now and then for a couple of weeks. But it was busy times. Lots of supplies going into the mine. And something else strange: nothing ever came back the other way. No copper, no ore, nothing raw and nothing refined. One time I asked one of those white- shirt truck drivers how that worked. Did they dig a dry hole or what? And he looked at me like I was something that crawled into his boot during the night. No, he says, we're still getting it up and running. Meanwhile staring at my name where it was stitched on my shirt. Making notes.

  The next day the shift boss took me aside and gave me a lecture about minding my own business, do my work and let the truckers do theirs, etcetera. And if I wanted to keep my job I should shut my mouth and get on with it. Which didn't really bother me because I'd got to the point where I'd saved enough of my salary to move on. And it looked like there'd be no hard feelings if I did.

  Which might have been the end of the story if Bastián hadn't spent one of those Chilean holidays, I forget which one, Feast of the Virgin, Feast of Peter and Paul, Feast of What ever, in Antofagasta with his buddies from the port where he used to work. He came back with a couple of bottles of Pisco. No drinking allowed in the camp but he bribed a guard. So he and I sat up one Friday night and shared a bottle, out behind the ware houses where there was nobody to see us. Getting steadily drunker and complaining about the job. When up comes that light again, brighter this time. Like a wire strung between the desert and the stars. And somehow we get the stupid idea of taking one of the Toyotas in the motor pool and driving east, at least a little ways, just to see if we can see what's going on.

  You know what they say about curiosity, right? Killed the fucking cat.

  Eugene Dowd interrupted his monologue to attend to the actual painting of the car, and the noise of the compressor and the stink of the paint drove Cassie outside. Thomas was fascinated by Dowd's work on the car, and Cassie agreed to let him watch as long as he stayed behind the glass door of the upstairs office— a ventilator built into the wall of the garage sucked most of the urethane mist out of the building, but Cassie didn't want him breathing even a little of it. Beth volunteered to stay with Thomas where she, too, could watch Dowd. She had been watching Dowd all day, Cassie had noticed, and Dowd had returned every one of her frequent glances, with interest.

  Outside, the sky was cloudless and the air was tolerably warm for December. Cassie walked past Dowd's noisy wind chimes, around a corner of the garage to a patch of packed brown earth, sheltered from the wind, where a pair of ancient lawn chairs had been set up. She was surprised to find Leo in one of them, reading.

  Reading a book. Reading the book her uncle had written, The Fisherman and the Spider. She gaped at the tattered yellow jacket. "That's mine, Leo— where'd you get that?"

  He looked up, startled. "Hey, Cassie."

  "The book," she said grimly.

  "Oh. Sorry. Yeah, it's yours. I grabbed it from the hotel room in Jordan Landing."

  Cassie had thought the book was lost. She didn't know whether to be grateful to Leo for saving it or angry that he hadn't bothered to give it back.

  He added, a little sheepishly, "I didn't think you'd mind . . ."

  She sat down in the brittle webbing of the second chair. She imagined herself falling through, getting her behind stuck in the aluminum struts. That would be graceful. "No. I mean, I guess it's okay. But I do want it back. You're actually reading it?"

  He raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, this is me, actually reading it. That surprises you?"

  "I don't know. I just never pictured you . . ."

  "Reading books?"

  Frankly no, though she was less surprised now than she once would have been. His finger marked his place in The Fisherman and the Spider, about halfway through. She said, "Well, what do you think of it?"

  "It's your uncle's book, right?"

  "Right."

  "About insects."

  "He studied them."

  "But really about the hypercolony."

  She was pleased that he understood this. "In a way, yeah."

  He turned his head up toward the sky. "I was thinking about the way they talked about it in school. The great discovery. Marconi bouncing signals from Newfoundland to France. The radio- propagative layer."

  Cassie nodded.

  "But it's alive. And that's what your uncle's book is about, at least between the lines. The hypercolony as a kind of insect hive."

  It was an idea Cassie had struggled with for a long time. She could grasp that the hypercolony was a diffuse cloud of tiny cells surrounding the Earth, each cell functioning like a neuron in a kind of brain. A huge, peculiar brain, surrounding the Earth. Okay, she got that. And it intercepted human radio signals, analyzed them, subtly altered them, and bounced them back in ways people found useful.

  All that was basic Society stuff. And since the hypercolony was a sort of brain, she accepted that it might be intelligent. It had to be intelligent, to do what it did. Some early Society theorists had even tried to make contact with it: they had broadcast signals on dormant frequencies, sending out simple mathematical formulas or even questions in basic English, hoping for a response. But
no response had ever come.

  It was the Society's mathematicians and cyberneticists and in no small part her uncle who had come up with an explanation: the hypercolony functioned without conscious volition of any kind. The hypercolony didn't know anything about itself or its environment, any more than a carrot understands the concept of organic farming or the color orange. It just lived and grew, mindlessly exploiting the resources available to it: vacuum, rock, sunlight, other living things. Its powers were in some respects almost godlike, but it was an insect god— mindless and potentially deadly. Her uncle had known that, and though he couldn't mention the hypercolony by name in his published book, Leo was right: it was there between the lines, on every page.

  He gave her a brooding look. "You'd think it would be hard to hate something you can't see or touch. But it's not. I do hate the fucking thing. I hate it as much as my father does. He used to say, given that we know what we know, the only honorable thing to do is declare war."

  "In a way, isn't that what we've done?"

  "More than in a way. The man I shot . . . he was a casualty of war. Along with everybody who died in '07 and everybody who died last month."

  Of course Leo was still dwelling on the man he'd shot. So was Cassie. She thought the act was forgivable even if their defense would never stand up in a court of law. She accepted her share of responsibility, and she knew that in Leo's place she might have behaved the same way. But the memory was still too awful to contemplate. The blood, the furtive way they had tried to dispose of the body. And in the end, even if they shared responsibility, it was Leo who had pulled the trigger.

  He looked at the book in his hand, then offered it to Cassie. She shook her head. "Finish reading if it you want."

  "You ever meet your uncle?"

  "A few times. Before '07. But I don't remember much about him. Uncle Ethan and Aunt Ris visited sometimes, back when I lived with my parents. He was just a quiet guy who smiled a lot and didn't say much." And since Leo had raised the subject, Cassie allowed herself to broach a delicate subject: "My uncle was pretty close to your father. According to Aunt Ris, Werner Beck was pretty much the head of the whole Correspondence Society."

  "I bet she said more than that."

  "Well—"

  "It's okay, Cassie. I know my father has enemies."

  "I'm not sure enemy is the word. She said he was brilliant." Which was true, though her other words had included arrogant and narcissistic.

  "He's not shy about telling people things they need to hear, whether they want to hear them or not."

  "He wrote to you, right?"

  "Once a month. Long letters. He called it my real education."

  "How come you didn't live with him?"

  "After '07, he figured I wouldn't be safe anywhere near him. He sent me to live with a cousin of his in Cincinnati. A married couple, no kids, they didn't know anything about the Society. He paid them pretty generously to look after me. They put me up in a spare room and enrolled me in school. Decent people, but they didn't really want me there . . . and it wasn't where I wanted to be. So as soon as I was legal I bought a bus ticket to Buffalo and got a job washing dishes. I knew there were survivors there who could help me out. My father told me about your aunt and the people she was connected with, how to get in touch with them. He didn't really approve, but I think he understood."

  "But we weren't what you hoped we'd be?"

  "Well. You know what my father used to say about the Society? He said it was social club when it should have been an army."

  Possibly true. "That changed in '07," Cassie said.

  "No, not for the better. The murders were obviously meant to drive the Society into hiding, and that's what happened. We cringed like dogs. Quoting my father. Which is what I found in Buffalo, a bunch of whipped dogs . . ." He gave Cassie a look that seemed both sheepish and defiant. "Anyway, that's how it seemed. Don't do anything rash. Whisper. Mourn, but don't get angry."

  "Some of us did get angry, Leo. Even if it didn't show. Some of us were angry all along."

  "Yeah, I suppose so." He shifted his legs, making the ancient lawn chair creak. The only other sound was the wind furiously tangling the wind chimes. "Anyway, what could I say? My father survived '07. I wasn't an orphan. I could hardly complain to someone like—"

  "Like me?"

  "Someone who'd seen what you'd seen."

  Well, yes, Cassie thought. She had caught one indelible glimpse of her parents' slack and bloodied bodies before Aunt Ris covered her eyes and pulled her away. You can't unsee something like that. But what did that buy you? Only bad dreams and guilt. A clinging sadness she could never quite escape.

  But anger, too. We never lacked for anger. "Well," she said, "we're in the same boat now."

  "Orphans?" Leo asked sharply. "Is that what you mean?"

  "No. I mean—"

  "I don't know for sure he's dead. But whether is or whether he isn't, he wouldn't have sent me here unless he wanted me to finish his work."

  "You really think Eugene Dowd can help us do that?"

  "Dowd seems to think we're here to help him. But my father trusted him."

  "To do what?"

  "I guess we'll find out," Leo said, "when he finishes his story."

  16

  ON THE ROAD

  SOMEWHERE ON THE TURNPIKE WEST OF Columbus, Ohio, the events of the last few days settled on Nerissa like an unbearable weight. Suddenly breathless, she asked Ethan to pull over. She was out of the car before he finished braking, falling to her knees next to a weed- clogged drainage ditch. A barrel stave had tightened around her chest. Her head felt heavy. The sun was viciously bright, the noise of passing trucks cruelly loud. She put her hands into the yellow grass, leaned forward and vomited up the remains of this morning's breakfast.

  When the spasm passed she shut her eyes and took small sips of the chilly December air. The darkness that formed behind her eyelids was cavernous and oddly comforting. She didn't move until she felt the pressure of Ethan's hand on her shoulder.

  "Ris? Are you all right?"

  Obviously not. But in the sense he meant . . . well, she was recovering. "Help me up, please, Ethan."

  She leaned into him until her dizziness passed. Back to the car, then, where she rinsed her mouth with bottled water, spitting it onto the verge.

  Funny how this feeling had snuck up on her. It wasn't the mem ory of the sim's awful death that had triggered it. It wasn't even the horrific inference she had drawn from her meeting with Mrs. Bayliss, the idea that a human womb could be shanghaied by an alien organism. What had sent her reeling out of the car was simply the thought of her niece and nephew, of Cassie and Thomas, friendless and vulnerable and believing she was dead.

  Not that it was exactly a new thought, but she had kept it at a safe distance in the frenzied activity of the past few days. But time, or the drowsy, sun- warmed comfort of the moving car, had lowered her guard.

  She allowed herself another sip of water as Ethan steered back into traffic. A pair of eighteen- wheel trucks barreled past, lords of the turnpike on this chilly weekday afternoon. She found herself thinking of the custody hearings back in '07, held in the aftermath of the massacre. A panel of Family Health and Social Welfare workers had reviewed Nerissa's suitability as a caregiver for her orphaned niece and nephew. Nerissa had testified to her willingness to make a new home for them, had promised they would receive any counseling or therapy they might need. And those vows had been authentic; she had made them without reservation, though she was less than certain of what FHSW called her "parenting potential." In the end, the tribunal had expressed more confidence in her ability to raise two kids than she actually felt.

  She had always admired her sister's devotion to her children, even occasionally envied it; but children had never been on Nerissa's agenda, except in a vague maybe- someday sense. Her career and her troubles with Ethan had rendered the question moot. Then, suddenly, she found herself responsible for two traumatized children. She
had taken a leave of absence from the University after the murders and she knew that going back would make her a sitting target, should the killers return. A new city, responsibility for Cassie and Thomas, the unfathomable threat hanging over them all, not to mention her own burden of traumatic memories . . . some nights she had come awake in the sweaty certainty that she couldn't handle any of it: the kids would despise her; she would be reduced to poverty; they would all be butchered in their sleep.

  But it hadn't happened that way. The kids had slowly adapted. For months Cassie had covered her ears at the slightest mention of her parents; she had been clingy, reluctant even to walk to school by herself. Slowly, however, her confidence had crept back. And so, in equal measure, had Nerissa's. It was as if they had learned a silent magic: how to draw strength from each other in a way that left each of them stronger. Thomas, though he was younger than Cassie, had recovered even more quickly. There were difficult moments, of course, sudden and unprovoked outbursts of tears or anger, demands to be taken back to his real home, his real mother . . . but Thomas had been willing to accept Cassie's consoling hugs and, later, Nerissa's. She remembered the first time he had come crying into her arms. The surprising warmth and weight of him, the damp patch his tears left on her shoulder.