Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He turned the corner from the avenida into the narrower calle where the mail drop was located. The stores here were doing brisk business, clothes racks and laden tables crowding the sidewalk, catering to tourists who had missed the dense knot of such establishments in the Zona Dorada. Eugene was still rattled by what Leo had said about a familiar face, and he moved cautiously, peering into shop windows as if he were debating the purchase of a seashell necklace or a picture postcard. Windows were useful because their reflections let him scan the passing crowd without being noticed. Leo shifted impatiently from foot to foot as Eugene conducted this methodical surveillance, but that was okay, it was plausible behavior for a young guy who had been, say, dragooned into a shopping expedition when he'd rather be down at the beach. Across the street and half a block away, the CERRADO sign had vanished from the door of the mail drop.

  Eugene was about to turn away from the shop- window reflection when he caught sight of someone moving through the throng of tourists with suspicious directness and determination.

  The man wore jeans, a denim shirt with the sleeves turned up, a sweat- stained DIABLOS ROJOS baseball cap, and a pair of black- rimmed glasses. None of that distinguished him in any meaningful way from the other locals Eugene had seen. It was his trajectory— a straight line aimed at Leo Beck— and his body language that set off Eugene's alarms. Not least, the way the man held his right arm stiff at his side. "Leo," Eugene said.

  "What?"

  "Leo, you might want to— oh, shit!"

  The object the man had been concealing under his right arm was a long- bladed knife. He brought it out and broke into a sprint, closing the distance between them with alarming speed. Eugene whirled, fumbling under his shirt for his pistol.

  Meanwhile Leo was still staring at him. Eugene used his free hand to give the kid a shove. Leo stumbled to the left, which was good, because the assailant was within cutting range now and had started a slashing movement that would otherwise have opened Leo's belly. Eugene managed to haul the handgun out of his trousers and disable the safety just as the man in the baseball cap turned toward him. The tip of the knife found him, a glancing slash that rebounded from his hip bone and felt like the touch of a frigid finger. Eugene leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger.

  Eugene had never shot a man, given that the creatures in the Atacama weren't actually human beings. He looked at the pistol as if it had appeared from some distant dimension. He felt the recoil burning in his wrist. He became aware of the panic that began to spread through the crowd, gasps and shouts, people starting to careen into one another like wobbly bowling pins.

  Then he looked at the man he had shot, who had fallen to the sidewalk and was leaking, in addition to blood, a green fluid that smelled like garden fertilizer.

  Eugene still hadn't killed a human being.

  "Run," he told Leo.

  Blending into the panicked crowd was relatively easy. Eugene stuffed the pistol under his waistband and pushed through a ring of horrified gawkers, made sure Leo was behind him, then broke into a sprint. Once they were under speed they were indistinguishable from a dozen other tourists whose reaction to the shooting and the sim's red- green bleed- out had been to dash for safety. After a few uncalculated and therefore usefully random changes of direction, Eugene slowed to a walk and waited for his breathing to return to normal. The injury he had sustained from the sim's knife was messy and increasingly painful, but so far his jeans were staunching the wound and soaking up the evidence. A cautious reconnaissance revealed no pursuing policías, though he could hear multiple sirens in the distance.

  At the hotel, fortunately, Beth and the two kids were killing time in the lobby restaurant; he didn't have to hunt them down, only herd them back to their room and order them to pack up their gear. Time had become centrally important. The mail drop, no matter what instructions Werner Beck might have left there, had been compromised and was therefore unapproachable. In which case the agreed- upon protocol was to proceed to Antofagasta for the meetup. Maybe there had been some revision to that plan, and maybe Beck had used the mail drop to communicate some such change, but as Eugene's mother used to say, might and maybe don't put money in the bank.

  Eugene stripped to his shorts. The sim's knife had pricked him neatly but not deeply, and he allowed Cassie to tape gauze over the wound. She bent to the work with the eyes of a forest animal blinking into the headlights of an oncoming car, but her hands were steady and she didn't flinch at the blood. He had begun to understand that she was maybe more reliable than Beth and that Cassie's slightly froglike exterior concealed a capable human being. Not so surprising, then, that Leo had begun poking her on the rebound.

  A couple of stitches, even amateur stitches with a sterilized needle and thread from a sewing kit, would probably have been wise. But there wasn't time for that. Better by far just to get on the road. After Cassie finished taping the bandage she started to pack, hesitating over the contents of her duffel bag as if it mattered whether her underwear was folded. "Just pack the fucking thing!" Eugene snapped. Did she not understand the significance of what had just happened? The dead sim had known Eugene and company were in town and had known where to ambush them. Sims were few and far between, Beck had had once told him, but they were clever and they operated strategically, so there might be more than one of them in Mazatlán— they could be closing in on the hotel at this very moment, an army of them, for all Eugene knew.

  "No, stop," Leo said, which only piqued Eugene's simmering annoyance.

  Leo was staring into Cassie's bag. He reached past her and pulled out something she had just dropped there: a book.

  "Back in the street," Leo said, "when I thought I recognized someone?"

  "Yeah? So? What about it?"

  Leo held up the book. It was called The Fisherman and the Spider. There was no fisherman on the creased and soiled cover, but there was a spider— an impressionistic rendering of what Eugene guessed was supposed to be a black widow, judging by the red hourglass on its abdomen. Leo turned the book over and held it close enough for Eugene to see the back. In the lower left- hand corner there was a black- and- white photo of the author, Ethan Iverson, some relation of Cassie's: a lean- looking guy with a crown of dense gray hair.

  "That's where I saw him before," Leo explained. "That's the man I saw before we were attacked."

  Cassie gasped. "He's here? Uncle Ethan is here?"

  "Just fucking pack your bag," Eugene said. "If he was here, he's probably on his way to Antofagasta by now. Just like us."

  "But we should try to find him—!"

  "We should stick to the fucking plan is what we should do."

  Cassie gave him an angry glare before she relented and went back to filling her duffel with wadded clothes.

  Steely little bitch, Eugene thought. More sure of herself than she liked to let on. He would have to keep an eye on her.

  22

  MAZATLÁN, MEXICO / ANTOFAGASTA, CHILE

  "WERE THEY THERE?" NERISSA DEMANDED.

  Cassie and Thomas, she meant. Ethan had just come back from the street near the mail drop. He said had been loitering there, watching traffic in the calle before making an approach, when he heard a pistol shot. He had fought his way through the crowd to the place where a wounded sim was dying, oozing fluids onto the sidewalk in front of a tourist shop. But he hadn't been able to see the attack as it happened. "I don't know who was involved," he said.

  Could Cassie have been there? Nerissa couldn't picture her niece with a handgun, but the boy with whom she had left Buffalo, Leo Beck, was probably reckless enough to carry one. "So what do we do?"

  "We go on," Werner Beck said flatly, before Ethan could answer.

  So they went on. Because Beck said so. Even though, in Nerissa's opinion, Werner Beck was subtly mad.

  She had been exercising a grim patience, cooperating with Beck because Beck had money for travel and a plan that might re unite her with Cassie and Thomas. Or at least with Beck's son, Leo. It was pos
sible that every step she took was carrying her farther from her niece and nephew, but it was equally possible (she hoped likely) that she had begun to close in on them— thus her patience.

  But Ethan's news about the killing of a sim unhinged all that studied calm. She wanted to run into the street and look for Cassie and Thomas, wanted to call out their names. She restrained herself from making that or some other stupid and impulsive gesture. Because, at least in this, Beck was probably right. The best they could do was to go to Antofagasta and make the connection there. Because that was where Leo was headed. Assuming no sims interfered. Assuming Cassie and Thomas survived the journey.

  And then what? A chilling thought occurred to her: What if Cassie had acquired through Leo a dose of Werner Beck's madness?

  Because it was madness— she was increasingly sure of that.

  Beck bought seats on a commercial flight to Santiago with a connection to Antofagasta. Their documents were cursorily examined as they moved through the airport, and the aircraft they eventually boarded was a sleek Fanaero United four- prop liner that stood into the cloudless sky and made a banking turn to the south.

  Nerissa longed to discuss her fears with Ethan, but they had enjoyed very little privacy since they had arrived on Werner Beck's doorstep. She could tell Ethan's faith in Beck had been shaken by prolonged exposure at close quarters. "He's not the man I knew ten years ago," Ethan had admitted when they had a rare moment alone. "But no one else knows what he knows or has his kind of leverage."

  Maybe so, but what had Beck really accomplished? He talked about a worldwide network of researchers and proto-soldiers, all primed to confront the hypercolony and to destroy its facility in the Atacama desert, which was wonderful, and maybe, at a stretch, even plausible, but the details were suspiciously sparse. Beck had offered Wyndham in England as a typical researcher, and he had cited Eugene Dowd, the man Cassie and Leo and Thomas were supposedly traveling with, as a typical soldier. But that hardly constituted an army. And it was little more than speculation on Beck's part that an attack on the Atacama site, even if it succeeded, would materially damage the hypercolony. There could be other such facilities elsewhere in the world. Beck said not— but pressed to explain his reasoning, he became evasive.

  He had been generous with his money over the years, but according to Ethan it was money he had more or less inherited; all Beck himself had done was to create a network of front companies and dummy accounts that allowed him to administer his own income without leaving an obvious electronic trail. And she wondered how secure that income stream really was. Beck's safe house had been a little shabby, and so was his customary wardrobe of tweed jacket and denim trousers.

  None of this amounted to madness, but how should she parse his style of conversation (mannered and condescending), his monomania, his obsessive attention to the minutiae of privacy and security? All the surviving families of the victims of '07 shared these traits, to one degree or another, but at least they had tried to build lives outside the boundaries of their necessary paranoia. Beck was entirely enclosed by it. Even Ethan, whose isolation in his Vermont farmhouse had been nearly as complete as Beck's, had managed to retain his sanity— maybe because he was objective enough to question it. Beck allowed himself no such unmanly doubts.

  And that was the crux of the matter. Beck was impervious to doubt. He believed in his army of followers, his implacable enemy, and his invincible strategy; and to question any of that was not only stupid but, in Beck's eyes, a betrayal so heinous as to be unforgiveable.

  Ethan, dozing next to the window, had left Nerissa with instructions not to wake him. The flight attendant served lunch as the plane curved over the Pacific west of Panama, but it was typical airline fare; he wasn't missing anything. She found her attention drawn to Beck's tray as he ate— the way he tugged the foil cover from the tray and folded it in thirds, likewise the wrapper from which he had extracted the cutlery. He took a sip from his thimble- sized cup of black coffee after every four bites. She counted. Four bites. Sip. Four bites. Sip. It was metronomic.

  "What are you looking at, Mrs. Iverson?"

  She jerked upright like a guilty schoolgirl. "Nothing . . . sorry."

  Beck glanced at Nerissa's tray, now a clutter of torn packaging and half- eaten food. "The attendant should be around shortly to pick that up."

  She forced a smile and hoped it would end the conversation. Beck shifted his gaze to her face, but his expression of disgust hardly changed. "Since we have a moment, can I say something?"

  "Of course."

  "I want to put this to you directly. Bluntly. Because it's obvious you're skeptical about what I mean to do in Chile."

  "I wouldn't say—"

  "All you want to do is reclaim your niece and nephew. And I have no problem with that. You're not a soldier, and neither is Cassie or Thomas. If they're in the company of Leo, they're only an impediment to his work. Taking them back to the States is probably the most useful service you could perform."

  Wake up, Ethan! Nerissa thought. But Ethan didn't stir. The plane lurched through a patch of turbulent air and she reached out to steady her coffee cup.

  "But you're wrong about what we're doing in the Atacama. Others have expressed similar reservations. I've heard the argument for accommodation more often than I care to remember, though less often since 2007— the idea that the hypercolony has given us something valuable in exchange for a trivial diversion of resources. The idea that interfering with that puts both parties at risk and even constitutes a threat to world peace. I have to say, it's a contemptible attitude."

  "I saw my sister and her husband murdered. I'm not inclined to forgive that." Where was the flight attendant? The entire plane seemed to have been enveloped in a kind of sunny afternoon coma.

  "I know. But you've wondered, haven't you, what we stand to lose if I'm successful?"

  Sure she had wondered. If it was true that the hypercolony had molded the world the way a potter works wet clay on a wheel— if it had actually coaxed prosperity out of poverty and made a tractable chorus of the world's discordant human voices— then yes: "Of course I wonder about the consequences."

  "As I see it, humanity will be forced to take responsibility for its own future."

  "For better or worse."

  "All of us who survived 2007 bear a heavy burden. People around us are allowed to go about their lives, while we carry this unspeakable knowledge. So we try to cope. We do what we have to do. You've elected to stand back and look after the children while others fight. That's your choice, and it's a good and useful one. But as a civilian, the consequences of what we do are not your concern. You need to let the soldiers fight the war."

  Between planes at Pudahuel Airport they sat in a lounge nursing drinks— mineral water for Beck, beer for Ethan, rum and Coke for Nerissa. She passed the hour between flights listening to an English- language news broadcast on a TV set behind the bar.

  Was the control of the hypercolony already faltering, as Winston Bayliss had suggested? More Russian and Japanese troops and gunships had been dispatched to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. There was footage of brick buildings collapsing under mortar fire. Such outbreaks were not altogether unknown and were usually tamped down as soon as they started, but this one might be different. The diplomatic saber- rattling continued to intensify and the League of Nations seemed helpless to intervene. Shattered walls, broken bodies: was that what the world would look like in five or ten or fifty years?

  She stole another glance at Beck. Give him his props, Nerissa thought. He was a clever and persuasive salesman. As toxic and as fraudulent as his worldview might be, he had successfully peddled it to a number of intelligent people, apparently including Ethan.

  In other words, he was a natural leader. But maybe that was what had made the last century so peaceful: an enforced vacation from natural leaders. And if the hypercolony were destroyed they would come storming back— our Napoleons, she thought. Our Caesars. Our terrible and rightful rulers.


  A smaller single- prop plane carried them from Santiago to Antofagasta, and as it bent down to the Cerro Moreno runway strip she caught her first glimpse of the coastal mountains that bordered the high salt desert of the Atacama.

  The driest place on Earth. More than forty thousand square miles of sand, salt and ancient pyroclastic debris. A great place to put an observatory, if anyone had been funding observatories, because the skies were so consistently clear.