Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was the place (if Beck was to be believed) in which the hypercolony had built its breeding ground. She tried to imagine that entity, to think about it without hatred or fear. Perhaps the way Ethan thought of it, as an organism of great age and complexity. It was intelligent, Ethan and Beck believed, but not self- aware. It didn't think, in human terms, but it calculated. It was like the computers the utility companies used, but infinitely more subtle, programmed by its own unfathomably long evolutionary history.

  And out there in the Atacama it had assembled some means to deliver itself to new, distant worlds. Using rockets, maybe, like the ones in the paperback science- fiction novels Cassie used to jam into her schoolbag, or something better than rockets. Something to do with beams of light. Something that could be constructed only with the resources of a technologically adept culture.

  If you looked at it that way the hypercolony wasn't really an enemy, at least in the sense of a malevolent, conscious opponent. And maybe that was what Beck had failed to understand. There was no more malice in the hypercolony than there was in a natural disaster . . . and it wasn't even necessarily a disaster, Nerissa thought, except for those of us who, like willful children, poked our fingers into the lethal business of the hornet's nest.

  Antofagasta was a busy industrial city. Copper refineries and cement factories etched parallel lines of smoke on the northern sky; a huge port dominated the harbor. Nerissa, Ethan and Beck took a taxi from the airport to a three- bedroom row house on the fringe of the hotel district.

  Night had fallen by the time they finished unpacking. Ethan turned on the TV, and a Televisión Nacional newscast began to repeat what Nerissa already knew about the fighting in Magadan. She crossed the street to a tiny Líder store and exchanged some of the pesos they had bought at the airport for basic groceries. Back in the kitchen she fried fish and vegetables for three but ended up eating very little of it herself. Her appetite had been fragile since she left Buffalo and she had lost a few pounds already.

  There was no evidence of the army Beck had said would be waiting for him. No cryptic messages, no hooded partisans knocking at the door. When she asked him about that, Beck said he'd contact "some people" tomorrow. And Nerissa carefully refrained from rolling her eyes.

  She and Ethan shared a bedroom. What made this especially unsettling was that to night might be one of their last nights together. Sooner or later Ethan would be off to the interior of the Atacama, Sancho Panza to Beck's Quixote, and with any luck she'd be back in the States with her niece and nephew. She might not see Ethan again even if he survived. She wanted him to survive, of course, but did she want something more than that? How much of their shipwrecked marriage might it be possible to salvage? If they were together under less dire circumstances, if they were granted time enough to discover what they had become after seven years of separation . . . what might be possible?

  He opened the curtains and turned down the bed. Nerissa repeated some of what Beck had said on the airplane and asked Ethan bluntly whether he still believed in Beck's plan.

  Ethan frowned. Even that small gesture was hauntingly familiar. The creases at the corners of his eyes. The buckled V between his brows. "I think it has a chance."

  "So you buy all that stuff about radio waves?" Nerissa understood the concept only vaguely, but Beck claimed to have isolated key frequencies at which the orbital cloud of the hypercolony communicated with itself. He believed he could disrupt those signals— not globally, but locally, at the Atacama site. Which would have the effect of isolating the Atacama facility from the orbital hypercolony. Which would render the resident simulacra inert, perhaps even kill them. Supposedly.

  "It wasn't just Beck who did the research. If he can suppress activity at the site long enough, then yeah, we can get inside and damage it. Whether that will have any lasting effect is hard to say. It depends on which theory of the hypercolony's life cycle you accept."

  "So even if it works, nothing might happen."

  "I'm pretty sure something will happen."

  "But the hypercolony might have a way of defending itself."

  "Also possible."

  "But you think it's worth doing?"

  He shrugged.

  Lying in bed, exhausted but sleepless, she found herself recalling a film Ethan had shown her years ago. A home movie, basically, made by one of his undergraduate students during a research trip to Japan. Ethan had been working with a nest of Asian giant hornets, insects that were also called "yak- killers"—the species was responsible for an average of forty human deaths every year. This particular nest was in a forest close to a settled community in Kanagawa Prefecture, and it would have to be destroyed once Ethan had secured specimens. Ethan approached the nest in protective clothing as carefully sealed as a diving suit. His face through the plastic visor looked tense but not frightened, and his movements were calculated, deliberative. Respectful was the word that came to mind.

  As he approached the nest it detected his presence and reacted to it. Dozens of wasps swarmed out and darted directly at him. The camera wavered but the cameraman stood his ground; two of Ethan's other students panicked and ran. Ethan did not. Even as the fist- sized hornets clustered on his visor, struggling with the selfless lethality of a suicide bomber to reach his face, he went about his work. And when he was done taking samples, he poisoned the nest with the same impersonal efficiency.

  She woke an hour before dawn from a terrible dream. In the dream Ethan had been back in Japan, but the hornets were as big as people and they had faces like the face of Winston Bayliss. She came to herself (I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost) convinced she had heard some ominous noise, but when she went to the window there was no one in the alley behind the house, only a cat digging through a drift of refuse. "Don't go," she said.

  She wasn't sure whether she meant to wake him. She heard him turn over in the bed.

  "Don't go. The only reason you can't see how crazy this is is that we've been neck- deep in crazy for years. Beck is delusional. There is no army. He doesn't know what's out there in the desert or where it came from or what it wants or how it can hurt you. Don't go."

  Enough of the ambient light of Antofogasta seeped through the window that she could see his head against the pillow, eyes closed. She assumed he was asleep, but he startled her by saying, "Come back to bed."

  "Ethan?"

  He didn't move. Maybe he still wasn't altogether awake. "I don't have a choice, Ris." His voice thick, words like an extended sigh. "This is what I have to do. There's nothing else. Come back to bed."

  The cat pricked its ears and chased something invisible down the alley and out of sight. Nothing else moved. The air itself seemed sterile and empty. Then I'll find my own way home, she thought.

  23

  CROSSING THE EQUATOR

  THEY FOLLOWED THE HIGHWAY IN TWO vehicles: Eugene Dowd's white van, with Dowd and Beth in it, and a sky- blue Ford Concourse Dowd had rented with the promise that he would return it to the rental agency's Valparaiso branch. Cassie took turns at the wheel with Leo, occasionally checking the mirror to see if they were being followed.

  The Trans-American Highway was an advertisement for the success of the Pan- American Common Market. It passed through some of the hemisphere's most rugged and beautiful terrain, and it was a feat of large- scale multinational engineering to rival the Channel Tunnel, the Danyang–Kunshan Bridge, or the Jordanian desalinization towers. Under other circumstances Cassie might have relished the trip. As it was, her connection with Leo Beck made it at least bearable.

  Had she adapted to Leo, or was it the other way around? But it seemed to Cassie that there was no compromise in their unfolding relationship, only a series of surprising discoveries. Cassie had been with boys before, on what she preferred to think of as an experimental basis. Well, two boys. There had been Rudy Sawicki from high school, a math prodigy with bad skin who was nevertheless sweet and gently lascivious when they were alone together. But he w
asn't Society, and their relationship had collapsed under the weight of unspeakable truths. And there had been Emmanuel Fisher, whom everyone called Manny: he was Society, and for a year they had seen each other every weekend. But the closer she got to Manny, the more he felt entitled to make decisions on her behalf or to overrule decisions she had made. Eventually, after a trivial argument about homework, he had called her a bitch and thrown her copy of Wuthering Heights against the wall so ferociously that the school librarian complained about the broken spine. By mutual consent, they hadn't dated after that.

  From a distance Leo Beck had seemed like just another nervy, chain- smoking Society boy. Undoubtedly that was what Beth had imagined him to be. (Cassie was tempted to wonder what Leo had seen in Beth, but that was a mean thought.) So it had surprised her to learn that Leo was a habitual reader; it had surprised her to see how easily he related to Thomas. In bed, during the few but precious opportunities they shared during the drive south, Leo was gentle when she wanted him to be and fiercely eager at exactly the right moment— and he was good company afterward. With Leo beside her she could sleep soundly, even in a dark room in a strange country. As her eyes closed he kissed her ear or her forehead and whispered, "Sleep well." Simple, comforting words. She cherished them. You too, she thought. Sleep well, Leo.

  The Trans-American Highway crossed the Darien Peninsula on the Pacific side of the peninsula's mountainous spine. Often she could see the highway winding ahead of them, a high steel ribbon where it spanned marshes and gorges or hugged rocky scarps, though as acts of engineering the tunnels were even more impressive, cutting through massive rock- faces as cleanly as a bullet. As the day approached noon Dowd signaled his intention to pull over at the next rest stop, which turned out to be a wide space at the side of the road featuring a cafeteria, four pumps marked GASOLINA SINPLOMO, a gift shop, and a view that rivaled anything Cassie had ever seen in Aunt Ris's back issues of National Geographic.

  P A R T T H R E E

  BURNING PARADISE

  What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know— or think we know— what

  our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we expe

  rience it on a daily basis.

  But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is

  the intelligence of the hive— the complex behavior that

  arises from individually unintelligent organisms following

  a few simple behavioral rules in response to

  cues from the environment. And there is a kind of in

  telligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole.

  Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as

  crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler

  monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without

  devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You

  might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless

  intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own.

  What are the limits to mindless intelligence? Or,

  and here's an even more striking question, could

  mindless intelligence successfully mimic mindful

  intelligence? Could an entity (an organism, hive,

  ecosystem) learn to speak a human language, perhaps

  even deceive us into accepting it as one of our own and

  allowing it to exploit us for its own purposes?

  Such an entity would lack real self- awareness. It

  would never experience the inner life we discussed in a

  previous chapter. But given an adequately broad sample

  of human behavior to mimic, it could almost certainly

  conceal those deficits from us.

  Why would such an entity want to fool us? Perhaps

  it wouldn't. But mimicry is one of the common strategies

  by which a species gains an advantage over its

  competitors. We may hope the question remains for

  ever hypothetical. But the possibility is real.

  —Ethan Iverson, The Fisher man and the Spider

  24

  ANTOFAGASTA

  LATER—AFTER STORIES HAD BEEN TOLD on both sides, mistaken assumptions corrected, difficult truths shared— Nerissa asked Cassie to help her put Thomas to bed.

  "I can go to bed by myself," Thomas said, but it was a token protest, and he seemed secretly relieved when Nerissa led him upstairs. She took him to the room she had shared with Ethan until he left, where she separated the single beds, one for Thomas, one for Cassie. Nerissa planned to spread a blanket on the carpet and sleep by the door, guard- dog style.

  Cassie made no objection, though she seemed slightly miffed at the idea of being relegated to a room with her little brother. Nerissa had seen the looks that passed between her niece and Beck's son Leo, and she could guess what might have happened during the journey from Buffalo to Antofagasta. That was dismaying but not surprising, and Nerissa withheld judgment. But it was hardly practical to allow Cassie and Leo to share a room. . . . and Werner Beck would have vetoed the idea.

  Nerissa remembered Leo as a truculent adolescent with an unfortunate penchant for petty crime, but maybe he'd changed. Or maybe his truculence had been an understandable reaction to his status as his father's son. The awkwardness between Beck and Leo suggested the latter. Still, she would have thought Beth Vance was more Leo's type. But Beth had apparently been more attracted to Eugene Dowd, the semi- literate garage mechanic Beck had shanghaied as one of his "warriors."

  At least Dowd— unlike the rest of Beck's supposed army— had actually shown up for the battle.

  Thomas's eyes closed and his breathing steadied almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Nerissa tucked the blankets around him while Cassie stood at the window, looking past the wrought- iron balcony railing to the dusty back alley where a garbage truck groaned through the heat. "The next thing we need to do is get you and Thomas back to the States."

  Cassie closed the curtains. "Really? Is that even safe? After what happened with the man we killed—"

  "The man Leo killed." Nerissa had cringed when she heard this part of their story, but she hadn't shied away from dealing with it. "There won't be any legal problems. If it happened the way you said it did, there's no substantial evidence to connect you or Thomas to the crime."

  "Except for the man who saw us . . . the man Beth hurt."

  "At best, the police might have a vague description. And even if, somehow, they did come after you, it wouldn't be hard to put together an alibi. But you won't need one."

  "If the sims find us it hardly matters about the police."

  That was unfortunately true. "But it's not you they're after. You're in far more danger here than you would be back in Buffalo."

  "No." Cassie shook her head. "You're wrong. It was me they came for. The sim that got run over on Liberty Street was looking for me."

  "You don't know that. It might have been coming for me, or it could have been a ruse, or a feint, or even a way of getting at Beck through you and Leo."

  "I saw it looking at me from the street. It knew I was there."

  She seemed unwilling to admit any other possibility, and the

  discussion was making her agitated. "Okay, Cassie, but even so, all we can do is take care of each other the best we know how. You, me, Thomas—"

  "And Uncle Ethan?"

  "Maybe. He's in—"

  "I know. He's in the desert, looking for a place for Leo's father and his soldiers to meet up," Cassie said. (All Beck's imaginary soldiers, Nerissa thought.) "Are we going to wait for him to get back?"

  "I'd like to. But we may not have time. We need to be on a plane out of here as soon as it can be arranged."

  "Why?"

  "For one thing, we can't keep on exposing Thomas to this kind of danger. It's not right."

  "Leo's staying."

  "I'm not responsible for Leo. What Leo does is between him and his father."

&nbs
p; It had been Beck's idea to send Ethan to San Pedro de Atacama.

  According to Beck the plan was simple: get a mobile radio source and signal generator within effective range of the Atacama facility, shut it down by interfering with its internal and external communications, and destroy the facility while its inhabitants were incapacitated. Beck claimed to have laboratory evidence that this scheme would work. His faith in it was messianic and, Nerissa suspected, gravely misplaced.

  But Ethan considered the idea plausible, and at Beck's suggestion he had agreed to travel to San Pedro de Atacama to scout out a place where a truck full of radio gear, a similar cargo of incendiary material, and Beck's supposed fifty- man army could assemble for the attack.

  He had been gone for two days now. Because it would have been suicidal to report by telephone, there was no way of knowing whether or not he had been successful. And because he had been away, he hadn't seen the most recent evidence that Beck's scheme was jury- rigged if not downright delusional.

  The signal- generating device, which Beck had designed himself, had arrived in the back of Eugene Dowd's van, but the amplification and broadcast gear Beck had ordered from Valparaiso hadn't been delivered— hadn't even been shipped, according to the freight service; the vendor had declared bankruptcy. Beck sulked for an afternoon, then told Nerissa he could make do with off- the- shelf equipment from another supplier . . . which would nevertheless have to be discreetly purchased and delivered, delaying the attack by at least a few days more.