Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The guy looked weirdly calm, and I could see him real clear in that freaky light, trying to level his pistol before the Toyota hit him. Like it was a race between the pistol and the Toyota. The Toyota won. I hit him full- on.

  Which pretty near killed me. Any of you ever been in a car when it runs into a large animal, maybe a deer? No air bags on that vehicle. No seat belts. If my legs hadn't caught on the steering wheel my head would have gone through the windshield. As it was I took a nasty crack on the dashboard. Lost control. The vehicle went up on two wheels, almost turned over. It was halfway up the embankment before I got control of it again. Big dent in the front end and the engine making a sound like a circular saw with a bent blade.

  But the mall guard was dead. I knew that because he was all over the fucking windshield. He pretty much exploded on contact. Green shit everywhere. I mean I had to turn on the wipers just so I could see. Clots of red and yellow, yeah, like blood and I guess body fat, but mostly green— I guess you know what I'm talking about.

  "He was a simulacrum," Thomas piped up, needlessly.

  Yeah, a sim. But obviously I didn't know that then. It was just more weirdness. I was being chased by spiders with blades for hands, Bastián was dead, the mall guard was made of snot, and all I wanted was to be anywhere else in the world but this fucking desert. Kept my foot on the gas even when smoke started coming out from under the hood. Long as the wheels turned. One eye on the mirror at all times.

  Pretty soon they switched off that tall beam of light. And I killed the Toyota's lights and drove by the moon, just to be less conspicuous. I expected to be chased, but that didn't happen. At least not right away. And then I thought, well, where do I go? Back to the depot? Tell an overseer I totaled a company vehicle and by the way Bastián was cut in three pieces by a giant crab?

  Since there was nobody on the road back of me far as I could see— and in the Atacama that's a long way, even at night— I stopped the vehicle and tried to take inventory and come up with some kind of plan. Took off my shirt and tied it around my ribs to stop the bleeding. Obviously the Toyota wasn't going to make it much farther. Smoke kept coming even when I turned the engine off. I got out and opened the trunk. Found a spare tire— useless—a tire iron, the four- way kind— also pretty useless— and a jack. The jack had a detachable steel handle, which was better than nothing, so I took that. A knife would have been better. Even a box cutter. Anything. But the jack handle was the best I could do.

  Then I rolled the Toyota off the road and pointed it across the salt flats, got the engine running— barely—put the transmission in neutral, braced the tire iron against the gas pedal, put it in first gear and jumped the fuck out. The vehicle rolled out into desert on a slow curve, probably would have come right back to me except the engine died when it was a couple of hundred yards off in the flats. Engine caught fire. Pretty soon it looked like a bonfire, burning out there. I hoped it looked like I'd driven off- road and maybe died in the fire. Or at least that somebody might think that from a distance. Then I hunkered down behind the little dirt- and- pebble embankment at the side of the road, which was the only thing to hide behind, which wasn't much.

  Still trying to make a plan. The moon was close to setting and dawn was about an hour away. If more mall guards showed up I thought I might have a chance, but if a posse of those spidery things came down the road I figured I'd be better off slitting my own throat before they did me the favor . . . But then I saw headlights in the distance.

  It was just one truck. A four- wheel- drive Ford with roll bars and a pickup bed. It slowed down, probably because the driver saw the Toyota burning like a motherfucker out there on the salt flats. Stopped a few yards away from where I was hiding. Looked like there was two guys inside. One of 'em gets out. He's a mall guard— same clothes, same pistol on his hip. Flashlight in his right hand. He's looking down at the road, shining that light on the gravel, checking out the tire tracks where the Toyota veered into the salare. And every step brings him a little closer to me.

  So while he's staring at the ground I get up and run at him. All I have on my side is surprise. He sees me coming, of course. He drops the flashlight. Reaches for his pistol. But I swing the jack handle before he even touches the weapon. He dodges real quick, but I manage to stun him. So I hit him again, a home- run swing to the side of his head, which drops him like a bag of sand. I go down on my knees and take the pistol out of his holster.

  In those days I didn't know a lot about firearms, but I'd handled my daddy's old .45 a few times. So I switch off the safety and pray the fucking thing's loaded, because the second guy is getting out of the Ford in a hurry, and he's definitely armed and dangerous. I get off one shot, which goes through the Ford's windshield. Useless. Second shot clips the guy's shoulder, which turns him around. I'm up and running, he's still trying to bring his weapon up though his arm don't work right, third shot is to the head and boom, he's down.

  Another head shot for each mall guard, just to make sure. Which causes blood and green goo to leak all over my shoes.

  Then I get in their truck and drive. Full tank, reliable vehicle, and by this time I'm so high on adrenaline I start to feel pretty good about myself, all things considered. Back of me I can see more headlights, but I'm way ahead of 'em. I blow past the depot where Bastián and I worked, and by the time the sky gets light I'm halfway to San Pedro de Atacama and if anybody's following they're well out of sight.

  In San Pedro I traded the Ford to a guy no- questions- asked for his little piece- of- shit ten- year- old Hudson, which for some reason there are a lot of in the Atacama, somebody must've opened a dealership once . . . a plain dumb car, which I managed to drive all the way to Antofagasta before its tranny seized up. Laid low for a while, did day labor at the puerto until I could afford a plane ride back to the USA. Back home I spent a year or so trying to chase all this shit out of my head with Jack and Coke, hold the Coke, until I shot off my drunken mouth to that writer. After which Werner Beck showed up and more or less explained things to me.

  And that's my story.

  "But that doesn't explain anything," Leo protested.

  "What do you need explained?"

  "The light in the desert? The spider things?"

  "You should ask your daddy about all that, Leo. Assuming you ever see him again."

  "Also, what's in the back of your van that's so important?"

  "Your daddy should've mentioned that, too." Dowd grinned, displaying a row of crooked teeth. "You could call it a secret weapon. Or part of one."

  "And you keep talking about getting on the road. Road to where?"

  "Do you really have to ask?"

  Leo shook his head. "This is crazy."

  Dowd's grin expanded. "Amen, brother," he said. "No argument from me."

  18

  JOPLIN, MISSOURI

  ETHAN'S FIRST CONCERN WAS FOR Nerissa, who was hugely disappointed to discover that Cassie and Thomas and Leo hadn't shown up at Werner Beck's safe house.

  Ethan was disappointed too, of course. But Ris seemed to lose all the fierce energy she had been drawing on for days. She looked suddenly years older, and the tone she took with Beck was querulous and irritable. "So where are they— do you have any idea where they are?"

  Beck escorted them to a plain pine table in the kitchen of this small, plain house. "Sit down," he said.

  "And Leo! He's your son, for Christ's sake! Are you telling me you can't find him?"

  "We made plans for this contingency."

  "What plans? What do you mean?"

  "If Leo's doing what I told him to do, we should be able to catch up with him. And if Cassie and— what's the boy's name?"

  Nerissa shot him a poisonous look. "Thomas."

  "If Cassie and Thomas are with him, that will be your opportunity to take them out of harm's way. But obviously, Mrs. Iverson, I don't know with any certainty where any of them are right now. I can't snap my fingers and make them appear in front of you. You need to exercise so
me patience."

  "Do you care to explain any of that?"

  "I'm as concerned about Leo as you are about your niece and nephew, and I'll do everything I can to guarantee their safety. The situation is complex, and I'd be happy to talk about it, but in the meantime maybe you'd like to have a shower and a change of clothes? No offense, but you look like you could use it. I'll put together a hot meal for all of us as soon as you're refreshed. How about that?"

  It was testimony to her fatigue that she sighed and nodded. Beck told her how to find the bathroom.

  "I understand why you brought her here," he said when she left the room. "But it's frankly a little awkward."

  Ethan didn't want to get into that discussion, at least not yet. "How many houses do you own, Werner?"

  "Enough. They're only tools. You could say, weapons of war."

  "The sims came for you, didn't they?"

  "I got out of my place in Illinois minutes ahead of them. I'd been there too long in any case— I knew it was probably compromised. I was packed and ready to go when they came to the door. They didn't see me leave."

  Ethan had heard speculation about Beck and his money— especially his money— for years before Beck confided in him. It was rumored that Beck had patented some useful invention. Or that he had inherited a fortune back in the 1990s. Or that he had criminal connections. Or all three.

  That he possessed both deep pockets and useful connections was undeniable. It was Beck who had organized and paid for the annual gatherings of Society members; it was Beck who had funded key research projects when educational institutions backed out; and after the murders of 2007 it had been Beck who helped out the survivors and their families, with cash and when necessary with goods otherwise unobtainable: new names, social security numbers, passports.

  Not to mention his apparently inexhaustible supply of safe houses, properties he owned but kept unoccupied so that he could relocate himself or others on a moment's notice. More than one Society member had called Beck paranoid, and maybe they were right. But it was, Ethan thought, at least a well- funded paranoia.

  "The thing is," Beck said, "you more or less walked into a war zone.

  "The war came to us. And you supplied the address, Werner."

  "Because we need to stay in touch. But I didn't expect you to turn up on the doorstep."

  "It seemed like logical thing to do, given that Cassie and Thomas are traveling with Leo."

  "I understand. But the situation is more complicated than you realize. I've been working with people who aren't part of the Society. The Society was never more than one aspect of this war, Ethan. You can think of the Society as a kind of intelligence service, gathering information about the enemy. That's good and useful work. But wars have to be fought. And they have to be fought by soldiers, not scholars."

  Ethan sat back in his chair as Beck got up to make coffee. The coffee machine on the faux- marble counter looked as if Beck had bought it yesterday. And maybe he had. The house itself still smelled untenanted, redolent of stale air and the chemical exhalations of undisturbed carpets and furniture. Ethan had a momentary vision of Beck as the kind of furtive animal that nests in abandoned buildings. But he looked martially efficient as he filled the machine's reservoir and dropped a filter into its basket. He was fifty years old, Ethan guessed, maybe older, but he could have been a weatherworn drill sergeant, still able to hike as far as any recruit and count off twice as many pushups. "You always were unhappy with the Society," Ethan said. In fact Beck's private letters had so often dripped with contempt for his colleagues that Ethan occasionally wondered why Beck bothered with them at all.

  "Well, I don't really blame the Society. So much of what we believed was essentially speculative. Before you turned up those ice- core inclusions all we really had was some anomalous data, a history of academic persecution, and a mother lode of surmise. The Society connected the dots, and what emerged was this frankly ludicrous idea, that the radio-propagative layer was also an organism. From elsewhere. From outer space. Even before '07, nobody wanted to say that out loud. A few of the old lions took it seriously— Fermi, Dyson, Hoyle— but even those guys never contemplated doing anything about it."

  "What could they do?"

  "As I said, I don't blame them. You learn to fly under the radar. Fine. But there's something to be said for facing facts. And since

  2007 we've been forced to face a few." Coffee began to seep through the filter and drip into the pot, a metronomic sound. "Or anyway, I have. You want anything harder than cream in your coffee? You look like you could use it."

  "No. Thank you." Ethan cleared his throat. "I was seven years in Vermont, living in a cabin in the woods. Does that count as facing facts?"

  "You killed some sims, you said?"

  He had already given Beck a partial account of events at the farm house. "Four altogether."

  "Well, good. You did what you had to. But that's self- defense. You were planning for the next attack, but not beyond it."

  "I managed to survive."

  "Right, but what now? What next? Find a new place to hide? Somewhere even deeper in the woods?"

  Ethan shrugged.

  "I wasn't willing to settle for that," Beck said. "What I've done these past seven years is make contact with people outside the Society, people who've had direct experience of the hypercolony or the sims."

  "I wasn't aware such people existed."

  "You think it's only scientists and scholars who can draw an inference or trip over a dangerous piece of knowledge? Think about it. I have reason to believe the sims constitute a tiny fraction of the human population, far less than one in a million. But there are at least a few doctors and coroners who've examined unusual bodies. Police officers who've witnessed perplexing deaths. And plenty of people who asked awkward questions and received unsatisfying or threatening answers. I made it my business to find those people."

  "How?"

  "All sorts of ways. Small- town and local newspapers are a good resource. Local stories usually make it to print before they can be filtered through the radiosphere— the copy goes straight to the composing desk. The press services would never pick up an item about a traffic accident that left green matter all over the road, or, if they did, the story would get lost in transmission— but local papers often publish it."

  "So you run down believe- it- or- not stories in rural newspapers?"

  "Much more than that. I have contacts on three continents. I've been able to put together a network of people who understand what we're dealing with— understand it viscerally, not just theoretically— and who are motivated to take action."

  "What kind of action?"

  "Every living thing is vulnerable, Ethan. Even the hypercolony."

  "You honestly think you've discovered a way to hurt it?"

  "If it couldn't be hurt it would never have expended so much effort attempting to hurt us."

  "Do you realize what you're admitting?"

  Ethan looked up, startled: Nerissa stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing fresh clothes and carrying a towel. Beck displayed a thin-lipped flush of irritation, quickly suppressed. "I hope you're feeling better, Mrs. Iverson. What is it you think I'm admitting?"

  "That you provoked it— the hypercolony. It isn't just afraid of what we might know, it's afraid of what you might do with that knowledge."

  "If that's true, I hope its fears are fully justified."

  "And the people who died?"

  "I didn't kill them."

  "You've involved your own son in this."

  "I could hardly exempt him."

  "And Thomas and Cassie?"

  "Please don't misunderstand. I want them out of harm's way as much as you do. Your niece and nephew are of no use to me."

  Ethan let Nerissa tell the story of the sim Winston Bayliss: what he had said, how he had died, and especially what they had discovered when they visited his home in Montmorency. "Mrs. Bayliss had had recent surgery, so she must have been human. But her
son was a sim. How is that possible? Do you know anything about that?"

  Beck was silent for so long a time that Ethan wondered whether he might refuse to answer. Then he said, "I can show you some recent research. You too, Ethan. This is work you haven't seen. Come with me."

  They followed Beck to the small living room of this small house and waited as he sorted through the contents of a cardboard filing box stashed behind the sofa. He extracted a manila folder and put it on the low coffee table. Ethan and Nerissa sat down while Beck pulled up a chair. "I should warn you. Some of the photographs are graphic."

  The folder contained rec ords of the work of an English veterinarian named Wyndham. According to Beck, Wyndham had been culturing pseudochondritic cells to explore their interaction with living tissue. For that purpose he had equipped a laboratory with cages of white mice and a few larger animals.