Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Protecting them had become the central business of her life. It was what was left, after so much else had been taken from her. And it was a job for which she possessed, to her surprise, a certain aptitude.

  But ultimately she had failed at it. She had been away from home the night the sims came back. And for purely selfish reasons. An evening at the theater with John Vance— Beth's father, who was one of the Society's singletons, separated from his wife after '07. They had seen a Performing Arts Center production of Twelfth Night. Then drinks at John's place. And then to bed, in the secure knowledge that Cassie could look after Thomas, that it was good for Cassie to feel in charge once in a while, to take on some of the responsibility she was beginning to assume as an adult . . . and other self- serving rationalizations.

  You let your vigilance lapse, Nerissa thought. She had felt safe enough to let a little buried resentment leak out— resentment of a duty she had never wanted but couldn't refuse; resentment that she had been relegated to a supporting role in the lives of these children rather than a starring role in her own. She had chosen to slake her loneliness in the company of a man for whom she felt nothing more than a passing affection. And as a result Cassie and Thomas were gone. Not dead (please God, not dead), but out there somewhere in the company of Werner Beck's cocksure son and John Vance's sullen daughter— bound, in all likelihood, for one of Werner Beck's safe houses. Assuming Beck himself hadn't been killed. The sims had been more selective this time around, but surely Beck was one of their primary targets. Because Beck, as Ethan had always insisted, was the heart of the Society. Its mainspring, its motivating force. Its most dedicated and most dangerous member.

  The turnpike ribboned through Ohio into Indiana. By dusk the sky had grown clear, the air colder. Outside Indianapolis they passed a local radio station, its broadcast antenna aimed like a steel flower at the meridian, whispering to the radiosphere, which would whisper its message back to the neighboring counties and suburbs . . . to the entire world, given a powerful- enough signal.

  Ethan tuned in the station in time for a newscast. The world was facing a nervous and unusual Christmas. In northern Africa, General Othmani's forces had encircled and destroyed a brigade of League of Nations peacekeepers. In Europe, a conference on the Balkan crisis had adjourned without reaching an accord. And the Russian Commonwealth and the Pan- Asian Alliance were butting heads over an oil port on the Sea of Okhostsk, with reports of an exchange of artillery fire.

  None of these small crises was unusual in itself, but the combination seemed ominous. "Sometimes I wonder if it's starting to unravel," Ethan said. "The peace they gave us."

  "Imposed on us. And I'm not sure we should call it peace."

  Pax formicae, she thought. The peace of the anthill.

  "If any of what Bayliss said is true— if the hypercolony is infected

  and at war with itself— that would obviously affect the way it manages the world."

  "Or else it'll all be resolved by New Year's." Nerissa shrugged. "No way of knowing."

  Then the state and local news. The Indiana legislature had passed a bud get extension. The Farm Alliance was threatening to boycott the Midwest Corn Exchange unless prices stabilized. State Police were participating in the search for four young persons sought in a murder- assault case. The weather would be clear and seasonably cool for the next few days.

  "If we drive through the night," Ethan said, switching off the radio, "I think we can make Werner's place by morning."

  She had met Werner Beck only once, at a Correspondence Society gathering in Boston before the massacres of '07. Brief as it was, the meeting had soured her on the Society and helped derail her relationship with Ethan.

  The Correspondence Society, true to its paranoid principles, was really two organizations. The majority of its members were academics or scientists who used the mailing list to share unpopular or even whimsical ideas related to their research. For those people it was little more than an academic equivalent of the Masons or the Shriners: a notionally secret social club, useful as a way of networking with other professionals. They weren't required to take seriously the idea of the radiosphere as a living entity.

  Those who did take the idea seriously were more likely to be members of the Society's inner circle, numbering no more than five hundred individuals in universities and research facilities throughout the world. Invariably, their work had confronted them with evidence they could neither safely publish nor honestly ignore. Ethan, for example. Ethan had been one of those outer- circle Society academics until his work with Antarctic ice cores. He had shared some of his results with Werner Beck, who had pushed him into conducting isolations of the chondritic dust he discovered in his samples. It was Werner Beck who had recruited him into the inner circle.

  The inner circle didn't hold conferences in the conventional sense, but every few years there was an informal gathering somewhere in the world. That year, Beck had booked rooms in a motel in Framingham outside of Boston. It wasn't necessary to rent function rooms— the Society attendees amounted to six men and two women (four from the U.S., one from Denmark, two from China and one from India); the entire gathering would fit comfortably in a single hotel room. Each delegate was scheduled to present a paper deemed too sensitive for the larger Society mailing list. Ethan would be reporting on his work with the ice cores; Beck, on the cultures he had succeeded in growing from Ethan's extractions.

  Ethan had introduced her to Beck in the motel's coffee shop. She had expected someone slightly larger than life. And maybe he was, but only in the metaphorical sense: Beck was no taller than Nerissa herself, and she topped out at five and a half feet. His hair was dark and thinning. He wore a beard: a uniform quarter- inch of facial hair so carefully manicured that it had a topiary quality. He dressed casually, in spotless jeans and a white shirt open at the neck, and in contrast to most of the attendees he looked as if he'd spent some time at the gym— broad shoulders, thick upper arms.

  His eyes were his most striking feature. There was nothing nervous or tentative about them. He looked at her steadily and with a bluntness that began to make her uncomfortable. Then he smiled. "You must be Mrs. Iverson."

  Ethan, typically, had forgotten to introduce her. "Nerissa," she said. "Hi."

  "Werner Beck." He shook her hand briskly and briefly, then turned to Ethan. "Last time we met you were single. You've done all right for yourself."

  "Thank you," Ethan said— a smidgen too obsequiously, Nerissa thought.

  "It's unusual to bring a spouse to one of these events."

  "We're both on a sort of sabbatical. Well, a vacation. After this weekend we're headed to Hawaii. Two weeks at Turtle Bay."

  "Sounds nice. Anyway, welcome, Ethan. We have a lot to talk about. Mrs. Iverson, I hope you don't feel left out. But Boston's a big city. I'm sure you can keep yourself busy."

  It was a dismissal, and not a particularly gracious one. Nerissa fought the urge to say something condescending in return. She had hoped Ethan might stick up for her, but all he offered was a nervous laugh. "Ris knows the city pretty well— she's lived here most of her life."

  "I'm sure. Anyway, we have our first gathering this afternoon at one. It's Wickramasinghe's session— he'll be talking about organic inclusions in meteorite fragments. A great lead- up to your work." Beck's eyes flicked back to Nerissa. "Nice meeting you, Mrs. Iverson, and I hope to see you again soon."

  "Well?" Ethan asked, after Beck had left the table.

  She shrugged. "He's well- groomed."

  "That's your impression of him? Well- groomed?"

  "A little oily." Since you ask.

  "He's just trying to make a good impression."

  "On the unexpected spousal baggage?"

  "That's not fair."

  Perhaps not. The Society, Ethan had told her, didn't have a strict policy on how much information members could share with their families. But it was understood that talking too freely could endanger one's career— that was why the Soc
iety had come to exist in the first place. And much of what the Society's inner circle had learned would have sounded bizarre or even irrational to an outsider. Nerissa understood that she would have to tread carefully here, perhaps especially around a key player like Werner Beck.

  But she resented being treated as an interloper. Or worse, a potential spy. As if she cared what these people discussed at their meetings. As if their ideas would ever be more to her than an unsettling and highly speculative hypothesis.

  "Anyhow," Ethan said, "it's his ideas that count. And he's a solid researcher. Since his wife died a few years ago, his work is all he has. And he can afford to devote himself to it."

  "He's a widower?"

  "Raising a son by himself."

  She allowed Ethan to change the subject. They talked about their plans for Oahu. Nerissa imagined a room with bamboo furniture, a breeze, the distant sound of the sea. And herself on a shaded veranda with a drink (something with gin and an umbrella in it) to extinguish any lingering thoughts about the forces that influenced human events.

  On Saturday she wandered through the secondhand bookshops in Old Boston. Nerissa found bookstores soothing, especially antiquarian bookstores— the smell of old ink, the muted acoustics. She wanted something smart but not too challenging, and she eventually settled on a tattered second printing of Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister. Back at the motel she staked out a table by the window of the bar and began to read. She had not reached the end of the first chapter when she became aware of a looming shadow. A woman of, she guessed, forty- something, carrying a drink and blinking from behind an impressively dense pair of eyeglasses. "You're Ethan's wife, right?"

  Nerissa nodded cautiously.

  "I thought so. I saw you with Ethan and Beck the other day." Her voice was small (birdlike, Nerissa thought) and she spoke with a French accent. "I'm Amélie. Amélie Fournier. I'm one of the— well, you know. I'm with the Society. Do you mind if I sit with you? Or if you'd rather be alone—"

  "No, please sit. I'm Nerissa."

  Amélie lowered herself into a chair. "Thank you. I'm playing hooky from the meeting. Is that the right expression? Playing hooky? I find I can endure only so much of staring into the abyss."

  "The abyss?"

  "I mean the deep of the sky. And what lives there." Amélie

  wrinkled her face, an expression not quite approximating a smile. "Of course, I don't know how much Ethan has discussed with you . . ."

  "My husband and I don't keep secrets."

  "Really? That would be unusual. But of course I shouldn't be talking about these things at all. Mr. Beck would be upset with me. But I discover I don't really care. I'm tired of Mr. Beck. I prefer the company of the unenthusiastic. By which I mean someone who is not so highly partisan. Mr. Beck considers himself a warrior. In his eyes we are all unsatisfactory soldiers. Some of us are reluctant to be soldiers at all, much to his disgust. I'm sorry, would you rather talk about something else? I can be a bore when I drink. People tell me so."

  "Not at all. It's refreshing to get another point of view."

  "As opposed to your husband's?"

  "My husband's opinion of Mr. Beck is somewhat higher than yours."

  "Yes, I am in a minority. I admit it. I think there are truths Mr. Beck is unfortunately ignoring."

  "Such as?"

  Amélie hesitated. She ran a hand through her hair, which was cut in a style Nerissa hadn't seen before, like sleek dark wings. "Each of us at this meeting represents a certain discipline. Mine is astronomy. I am an astronomer. Have you ever looked through a telescope, Nerissa?"

  "Once or twice."

  "Optical telescopes are old- fashioned. Nowadays we look at the sky at invisible wavelengths. Or with photographic plates. The naked eye is an unreliable observer. But I was raised by a man whose hobby was astronomy. We lived in Normandy, in the west of the country. My father owned a large property there. Farmland. Far from the cities. The sky was dark at night. The stars were a constant presence. I became fascinated with the stars, as was my father. He used to say that there was something noble about the act of looking through a telescope. Human beings are small animals on an insignificant planet, but when we look at the sky— when we understand that the stars are distant suns— we begin to encompass an entire universe.

  "As a child I was enthralled. Of course, I thought about the possibility of other worlds circling those distant suns. Inhabited worlds, perhaps. Planets perhaps with civilizations like our own, but more primitive or more advanced. Childish fantasies, but even a scientist may entertain such ideas.

  "As an adult I discovered that a career in modern astronomy was more prosaic than I expected. My post- graduate project was a study of the propagative layer, the radiosphere, using high- frequency interferometry. My work met with resistance. It was hard to get cooperation or research time on the larger dish antennae. The details don't matter— a tenured colleague from another university became aware of my work and introduced me to the Correspondence Society." Amélie smiled ruefully. "Much was explained."

  "You believed what they told you? About the radiosphere being alive?"

  "They offered me the evidence and allowed me to draw my own conclusion. Don't you believe it?"

  "I'm not a scientist. I guess you could say Ethan convinced me. His conviction convinced me."

  "Life," Amélie said, "not of this world, and almost near enough to touch. At first it was only a surmise, but the evidence is now conclusive. Thanks in part to the work of your husband. The small seeds embedded in ancient ice cores. Think of that, a sort of gentle snow of alien life, very diffuse, sifting down from the sky, accumulating over centuries. And not dead, but still in some sense living. We are enclosed in an organism, which facilitates our communication and moves us, as a species, in a certain direction."

  Herds us, Ethan had once said, the way certain ants herd aphids.

  "It's a marvelous, a terrifying, an utterly unpalatable truth." Amélie waved a hand at the sky— well, the ceiling— and came within an inch of knocking her drink to the floor. "For some years now we have consoled ourselves with the idea that the relationship between ourselves and this entity is symbiotic. Do you know that word? Mutually beneficial. It preserves and enhances the peace of the world, and in return . . . ah, what it takes in return is a matter of some debate. But Mr. Beck is more pessimistic. He suspects the relationship is purely parasitical. What the hypercolony wants, it will eventually take. Its intervention in our affairs is entirely selfish. If it wants us to be unwarlike, it's so we won't develop the weapons we might use to defend ourselves."

  "You think that's true?"

  "I don't know. The evidence is controversial. But consider the implication, if what Mr. Beck believes is true. There is a form of life that is distributed throughout galactic space, and it depends for its survival on the exploitation of civilizations like our own. What does that mean?"

  "I suppose . . . well, that civilizations like ours must be relatively common."

  "Yes, perhaps. At least common enough to have played a role in the evolution of this entity. This parasitical entity. This successful parasitical entity. The parasite is here, all around us—" Amélie leaned close enough that Nerissa could smell the alcohol on her breath. "But where are its previous victims? Where are these other civilizations like our own? Why haven't they warned us against it? Why aren't they here to help us?"

  "I don't know. Maybe it isn't practical, or maybe they don't care . . ."

  "Or maybe the predator, having devoured its victim, leaves only a corpse behind."

  The bar was aggressively air- conditioned. Nerissa shivered.

  Amélie nodded. "You understand, I think. And this is what has destroyed the plea sure I once took in looking through the telescope. All those wonderful possibilities. But now when I see the stars I think, death. Killing. Nature, red in the tooth . . ."

  "Red," Nerissa corrected her, "in tooth and claw." Amélie was quoting Tennyson, whether she knew it or not.
A passage about "man," that Victorian abstraction, Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law— / Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw / With ravine, shriek'd against his creed . . .

  " 'In tooth and claw.' Exactly."

  "And you blame Beck for changing the way you look at the sky?"

  "Blame Beck? No, not for that." Amélie smiled bitterly. "No. I blame Mr. Beck for propositioning me very crudely when we were alone in his room, and then belittling my work because I refused his advances. But that's the kind of man he is." She stood up suddenly, her chair teetering behind her. "I think Mr. Beck is as deluded as the rest of us. He simply cherishes a more militant delusion. Watch out for your husband, Nerissa. I mean to say, be careful of him. Protect him. Because he seems terribly impressed with Mr. Beck's ideas. And I think Mr. Beck's ideas are frankly dangerous."