Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  And there was the question of his army. Fifty men, Beck had claimed. More like a platoon than an army. Fifty men good and true, recruited from three continents, to be housed in five safe houses scattered across Antofagasta. But at last report none of the alleged volunteers had succeeded in leaving their native countries. For replacements Beck had managed to recruit a dozen men from the pool of unemployed stevedores at the dockside union hall. These men believed they were being hired to transport liquor to an unlicensed ware house in San Pedro de Atacama, and while they would be useful for lifting and carrying duties, not even Beck envisioned them as combatants.

  It didn't matter, he insisted. As long as the radio gear and the incendiaries were delivered to the desert, a handful of men— even three or four— could successfully conduct the attack. If all went well.

  That was the plan on which Ethan had wagered his life.

  Downstairs, Nerissa found Beth Vance sitting by herself in the common room near the kitchen. Beth was still coming to terms with the news that her father was alive.

  A single unarmed sim had approached John Vance on the day

  Cassie and Thomas fled Buffalo. They had seen a body being removed from the apartment building where Beth lived with her father, but that had been the remains of the sim, which John had elected to shoot rather than engage in conversation. John had since gone into hiding, Nerissa didn't know where, but someone in Buffalo would be able to put him back in touch with Beth when they got home.

  Beth looked up at Nerissa with an expression that was hard to decipher. "Were you with my father when he killed the sim?"

  "We can talk about that tomorrow."

  "I'd rather talk about it now."

  "Okay," Nerissa said. "If you like. The answer is no, I wasn't there. I'd left for home by then."

  "But you spent the night?"

  "Yes."

  "I knew about that. He told me he was seeing someone. He just didn't say who." She darted another glance at Nerissa, looked away. "It wasn't the first time. He doesn't usually see Society women, though. Most women he doesn't see more than once. Actually, that's why I was at Leo's place. He didn't care where I spent the weekend, as long as I was out of the house."

  "Maybe so. And maybe it was a mistake, my seeing him. But I'm sure he's worried about you."

  "Not worried enough to come looking for me. Not the way you came after Cassie and Thomas."

  "That's not a fair comparison. He doesn't know anything about Werner Beck or Leo. Your father never paid attention to Correspondence Society business."

  Which, ironically, was one reason Nerissa had accepted John's invitation to spend the night. Like John, she had been connected to the Society by marriage; like John, she harbored an abiding anger at the way the Society had disfigured their lives.

  "Well, that's true," Beth said. "He doesn't even like me going to survivor meetings. Probably we wouldn't have had anything to do with the Society, except he needed the pension. It wasn't much but it made a difference. Do you like my father?"

  "We're friends, but I don't think it was going anywhere."

  "Not your type, huh?"

  "Maybe we just weren't the people we thought we were."

  "He can be a real shit. I'm not going back to him."

  "What?"

  "Don't look so shocked. I know him better than you do. I'll go back to the States, but I'm not living with him again."

  "But why?"

  "He never, you know, touched me or anything. But he likes to look. And he likes to say things."

  After a few wordless seconds Nerissa said, "I'm sorry."

  "It's okay. People aren't always what you think they are. But I guess you know that."

  Nerissa slept fitfully by the door of the bedroom, startled awake by every sound the house made in its negotiations with the cooling night. And when she did at last fall into a deeper sleep, she slept shamefully late. She needed to talk to Beck about arranging her flight to the United States— she was determined not to spend another night here; she would take the kids to a hotel if that was necessary— but by the time she was dressed and downstairs Beck and Leo had already left on some errand. They would be back— Cassie relayed this datum— before dinner.

  Noon came. Beyond the windows, the air itself looked pale and hot. Beth brooded in the shady common room with an equally sullen Eugene Dowd. Cassie sat in the kitchen, watching Nerissa heat precooked empanadas from the store across the street.

  Cassie wanted to talk about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said back at Ethan's farm house: the idea that the hypercolony might have been infected by some competing entity. Was that possible? Maybe, Nerissa said. Beck had claimed there was some evidence for it. But the hypercolony, like the devil, was a proverbial liar. Nothing it said could be trusted.

  "Still, if it's true, it could help us."

  "I doubt it, Cassie. It would only make the sims less predictable." And more dangerous, the way a wounded and cornered animal is dangerous. She thought again of Ethan, on this the third day of his sojourn in the desert.

  Beck and Leo came back in the still heat of late afternoon. Beck walked through the door with his shoulders squared and his head at a cocky angle, obviously pleased with himself. "We secured a small truckload of incendiary material," he told Dowd. "We can move as soon as the radio gear is in place."

  Nerissa was mildly surprised. No other part of Beck's plan had fallen into place so easily. But maybe it wasn't terribly difficult to buy black- market explosives in a town that catered to the needs of a vast mineral- extraction industry.

  Leo's expression was the opposite of his father's, a grim disdain. "Show them what else you bought," he said tonelessly.

  Beck gave his son a hostile stare, then opened the bag he was carrying in his right hand.

  Inside the bag was an unmarked white plastic box. He put the box on the kitchen table and pried it open. Embedded in a sculpted foam protector was a graduated glass syringe and a dozen needles in sterile paper sleeves.

  "Let me explain," Beck said.

  25

  SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA

  ETHAN CAME INTO SAN PEDRO DE Atacama at dawn, switching off the car's heater as the sun cleared the horizon. He felt tired and light- headed, probably because of the altitude. The Atacama plateau was almost eight thousand feet above sea level. Perilously close to the stars.

  And perilously close to other things. The Chilean government discouraged tourism in the Atacama, and according to Beck commercial air routes were designed to avoid this part of the desert. (Arrangements that had been made, he supposed, using the hypercolony's standard tool kit: telephone calls and radio messages subtly and imperceptibly altered or redirected, apparently minor decisions cascading toward a calculated outcome, no single intervention so overt as to create suspicion or leave an obvious fingerprint. . . . ) The only real industry anywhere nearby was the Chuquicomata copper mine to the northwest. The railhead and ware house complexes on the outskirts of town mainly serviced the Chuquicomata and a few smaller mines. The town itself was a pueblo with some fifteen hundred souls in permanent residence, and it was instantly obvious that Beck's soldiers might be inconspicuous on the road but would be impossible to lodge here without attracting attention. The only hotel in town was a three- story adobe building, a dozen small rooms enclosing a central courtyard and a waterless concrete fountain. Checking in, Ethan told the counter clerk he had come to see the Valle de la Luna.

  "¿Es usted un geólogo?"

  "Soy un geólogo por cuenta propia," he said, leaving the clerk to figure out what a self-employed geologist might be. He signed a false name to the register.

  He slept longer than he meant to, dreaming of a passage in one of his own books about the Glyptapanteles wasp. The Glyptapanteles wasp lays its eggs in the bodies of geometrid caterpillars, and the freshly- hatched larvae feed on the living insect— typical parasitical behavior, with the nasty twist that if the larvae sense the approach of a possible predator they cause their host to thra
sh in agony. Thus the victim is forced to put on a puppet- show of aggression, defending its murderers even as they devour its flesh. In his dream Ethan took no part but watched without emotion as the drama cycled through iteration after iteration. It was only when he woke that he felt a flush of horror.

  Misplaced horror, he told himself as he showered. His sympathy was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan's species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor.

  Without meaning to he had wasted most of a day in bed, and he meant to make better use of the time that was left to him. As the afternoon light faded he drove through the town to its industrial perimeter, the ware houses and fueling stations, the train yard where cargo containers and propane tanks huddled like the abandoned yurts of nomadic giants. From the road where he idled his car he could see a gang of mechanics servicing a hulking yard switcher, laboring under halide lamps as bright as minor suns.

  It was hard not to feel hopeless. The weight of what Beck wanted to do was enormous, and there were too many ways it could go wrong. It was impossible to know how many agents (human or sim) the hypercolony might have placed in San Pedro de Atacama, impossible to know how much of Beck's plan the hypercolony had already discovered or inferred. But these doubts might only be part of what Ethan was beginning to recognize as a gathering bout of depression, the circling wolves of despair. He couldn't help thinking about Nerissa: a long- closed door had opened between them, and he had let it fall shut again. For the sake of what? This mad act of human impudence?

  He drove aimlessly, and he was many miles from town before he realized he was following the road Beck had described to him, the road that led to the hypercolony's breeding ground. That would be fifty or more miles deeper into the desert, and Ethan had no intention of getting significantly closer. But the road was empty, the motion of the car comforting. A half- moon stood above the salt flats like a vigilant god. He was invulnerable in his unhappiness. He let the asphalt unspool a while longer.

  He pulled over to the verge when he saw he'd added almost fifteen miles to the odometer. The air was cold and he switched on the heater, reminding himself again that he was riding the roof of the Puna de Atacama, only a thin skin of atmosphere between himself and the vacuum of space. He watched the horizon for the shaft of light Beck had described, but there was only the slow gyre of the stars.

  He shivered and twisted the wheel to turn back. Traffic had been sparse, just a couple of box trucks and lowboys rumbling in the opposite direction, but a pair of headlights appeared in his mirror as he came off the gravel verge. Two unmarked white pickup trucks: the first, then the second, jockeyed abreast of him before passing at a furious speed. Ethan watched with relief as their taillights diminished in the distance.

  They hadn't come for him. But he was in a precarious place. He looked away from the road long enough to extract from the glove compartment the loaded pistol Beck had obtained and instructed him to carry. He put it on the empty seat beside him, not because he expected to use it but because it was reassuring to have it within easy reach.

  He thought again of his dream, the Glyptapanteles larvae tweaking their host into a frenzied writhing. It was as good an analogy as any for what Winston Bayliss had claimed was happening now: the hypercolony, breeding its young in the nutrient warmth of human culture, had been attacked by a competing and equally alien predator. Both predator and prey were attempting to exploit human beings in their struggle. And if that was true, whose interests would Beck's war serve? But to take the question seriously would mean abstaining from any action . . . a kind of induced paralysis, and maybe that was what the hypercolony hoped to achieve.

  Something Nerissa used to say: We see through a glass, darkly. From the Bible. The New Testament, if Ethan recalled correctly. Corinthians? Nerissa would know.

  In the dark glass of his rearview mirror Ethan saw more headlights coming up fast. He put a little extra pressure on the gas pedal, but the vehicles continued to close with him.

  We see through a glass, darkly . . . Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. . . . .There was something on the road ahead, obscured by the moon- shadow of an upright granite outcropping. He slowed until he could make out the obstacle, which he belatedly recognized as the two pickups that had passed him earlier, one in each lane of the highway, both now aimed in his direction, both stationary and dark. He swerved to pass on the verge when their high beams flashed on, blinding him. At which point it became impossible to do anything but stand on the brake or drive off the road.

  He managed to stop. The pistol slid from the passenger- side seat to the floor. He was groping for it when a man tapped on his side window with the butt of a flashlight. "Dr. Iverson?"

  Ethan's fingers closed on the grip of the pistol. He straightened up. The man standing outside the car wore jeans, a ball cap, a work shirt, and a bland expression. His eyes glittered in the moonlight. Ethan shot him through the window of the car.

  Safety glass exploded in a shower of fragments. By the time Ethan opened his eyes again the man— the sim— had dropped out of sight. But the odor of green matter mingled with the gunpowder stink of the fired weapon, making him think dazedly of chlorophyll, vinegar, bread mold, crushed leaves. . . .

  The headlights that had been following him belonged to two more identical pickups. They fishtailed to a stop behind Ethan, boxing him in before he could put the car in reverse. The only way he could move now was on foot. He fumbled through the side door and out, gasping at the thin air.

  Another human shape swarmed toward him. Ethan faced it and fired. There was the wet sound of a bullet impacting flesh, but it failed to do critical damage. The sim took Ethan's right arm above the wrist and twisted the gun out of his hand. Two more sims came out of the darkness and pinned him to the side of the car. He struggled uselessly, waiting for the killing shot.

  But it didn't happen. Yet another sim approached, this one in the shape of a slightly- built dark- skinned woman. It wore the same jeans- and- work- shirt outfit as the males, and its hair was tucked under an identical cap. It stepped fastidiously over the body of its colleague.

  "Dr. Iverson, I apologize for what happened here. We don't want to frighten you or hurt you. We want to talk to you." The sim took a pair of handcuffs from its belt. "I apologize for this, too. Please put your hands behind your back."

  26

  ANTOFAGASTA

  CASSIE AND THOMAS AND BETH CAME into the kitchen, staring at the syringe and the disposable needles on the table. Nerissa wanted to stare too, but she forced herself to look away. "What do you mean to do with those?"

  "Calm down." Beck's expression was impassive, his face the same assembly of clenched muscles and coolly evaluative eyes that had always made him seem so naturally authoritative. "I need to perform a test. It's not hard to understand. May I explain?"

  You'd fucking better! She waited for him to go on.

  "After the first round of attacks I had an opportunity to perform an autopsy on a simulacrum. A sim isn't much more than a human body with a core of green matter running through it, concentrated in the skull and the trunk but extending into the extremities. A hypodermic needle in the calf muscle of a sim will aspirate a small amount of that green matter. The same penetration in a human being just kicks back a few drops of blood, less than you'd lose to a sample at the doctor's office."

  "You are not," Nerissa said, "sticking a needle into me or any child I'm responsible for."

  "I'm afraid I have to. Ethan and Leo were almost ambushed at the mail drop in Mazatlan, even though that location was known to just a few of us. Before we set out into the Atacama— or before you fly back to the United States— I need to know that no one in this room has communicated our plans to the hypercolony."

  "What, you think I'm a sim? Or Cassie? Or your own son?"


  "I don't think so, and I'm not accusing anyone of anything. I just want certainty. Isn't that worth a little inconvenience? I got the idea from you, Mrs. Iverson."

  "From me!"

  "From what you told me about your interview with the mother of the sim in Pennsylvania. Given that sims gestate in human hosts, the fact that we all have well- established family histories means nothing."

  "We all have long histories with the Correspondence Society, too. Doesn't that count?"