Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

"Of course it does, but not in the way you're suggesting. Society researchers have been working with cell colonies ever since Ethan isolated the Antarctic samples. We've cultivated them in quantity, and with what seemed like reasonable caution, given that there was no obvious risk of infection. But we were wrong about that. We were almost certainly exposed. Any of us could have been infected, and we might have passed that infection to our families."

  "Ethan and I have no children."

  "No. But your sister did."

  Nerissa saw Cassie's eyes widen as she worked out the implication. Thomas just looked puzzled.

  "You are not doing this." Nerissa took her niece's hand, her nephew's hand. "Cassie, pack what you need and help your brother do the same. We're leaving."

  "I can't allow that," Beck said.

  "You think you can stop us?"

  "Eugene?" Beck said. "Mind the door."

  Dowd smiled thinly and moved to block the entranceway. He tugged back his shirt to reveal a pistol crammed into the waistband of his jeans, a gesture that looked to Nerissa both laughably theatrical and insanely, creepily threatening. "What, he's going to shoot us?"

  "I surely hope not. There's absolutely no need for it. But we're at war, whether you like it or not. Declare your objections, but please cooperate. We're talking about a momentary discomfort. Do it and have done with it. Then Eugene will drive you and the children to the airport and you can forget about all this."

  "Is this why you sent Ethan away? He would never let you get away with this."

  "If you like, you can watch me perform the test on myself before you submit to it."

  Nerissa thought about Eugene at the door. From what she had seen and heard of Dowd's behavior toward Beth, he was callous and potentially violent. But she doubted he'd shoot an unarmed woman. Unless he thinks refusing the test means I'm not human. Dowd had killed sims in the desert, according to Beck. And he was anxious to kill more. Was it worth the risk of testing his conviction?

  She wished she had even a moment more to think this through. But Beck was already reaching for the box of syringes.

  "Aunt Ris?" Cassie said.

  Leo stepped forward.

  "If you have to do this," he said to his father, "you can start with me."

  Beck carried the syringe, the disposable needles, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a package of adhesive bandages into a small room at the back of the house. The room, probably meant for storage, had been fitted with a wooden desk and two chairs. A narrow door, locked, faced onto the alley behind the house. There was no window. A fluorescent ceiling bar washed the room with pale, uncertain light.

  Beck took the chair behind the desk and gestured his son into the chair opposite him. He would have preferred to start with the Iverson woman, since she was the main stumbling block. But Leo had volunteered, so Leo it would be. He took a pistol from the top left drawer, examined it to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then put it on the desk next to the syringe.

  Leo looked from the pistol to his father and back again. "Really?"

  "Before we get started, let me ask you a question. Have you been sleeping with Cassie Iverson?"

  Leo stared and said nothing.

  "At this point you're allowed to tell me it's none of my business."

  "It's none of your business."

  "I ask because I know your loyalties might be divided right now. You want to protect Cassie. Naturally enough. But she doesn't need your protection. There's nothing dangerous about this. I'll show you. You can see how it works. Maybe you can help when we do the others."

  Beck pulled his chair away from the desk and rolled up the cuff of his pants. Then he dampened a tissue with alcohol and swabbed a patch of pale skin on the calf of his left leg.

  "The body of a sim has to appear fully human, and it has to be able to pass as human even after trivial injuries, bumps and scratches and so forth. That's why the largest deposits of green matter are protected by the skull and torso. At the extremities, the green matter runs thinner. It forms a kind of sac around the bones of the leg, for instance. So the needle—" He extracted a sterile needle from its package, screwed it into the barrel of the syringe, flicked off the protective cap. "The needle has to reach the bone."

  He pushed the needle into his leg. The penetration was painful but not unbearable. "The green matter is protected by a membrane where it interfaces with human muscle and fat, so I need to make sure I've actually penetrated the sac, if it exists. It takes a certain amount of pressure." He pushed until he felt the electric scrape of the needle against his femur. "If you want to make sure I'm not cheating you can do the rest yourself— pull back the plunger and aspirate a little blood—"

  "No," Leo said in a choked voice.

  "Then I'll do it." He allowed a few drops of blood to well into the

  barrel of the syringe. Red and quite human. He withdrew the needle. A bead of blood swelled from the puncture point. He daubed it with a tissue and covered the spot with a bandage. "That's it. Okay? When we finish here you can tell your girlfriend and her nervous aunt how simple it is."

  "Maybe so, but—"

  "Now it's your turn. Roll up your cuff."

  "Do you really think— I mean do you honestly think I'm one of them?"

  Beck dropped the used syringe into a wastebasket and peeled a fresh one out of its sleeve. "I'm not doing this because I suspect anyone of anything. I would prefer to trust my instincts. But people get killed that way. And if sims come into existence by parasitizing a woman's womb—"

  "You think I parasitized my mother's womb?"

  Beck paused with the syringe in his hand and gazed steadily at his son. "No. Of course not. But we have to be sure."

  "You wouldn't be doing this if she was still alive. If she was still alive maybe you wouldn't have gone so fucking crazy."

  "That's a disappointing answer."

  It was an insult Beck would never have taken from anyone else. And it was grotesquely untrue. Mina had never had that kind of influence over him. Beck had married her when he was a student, not long after he had been introduced to the Correspondence Society. If he had ever loved her— and he believed he once had— that love had been undermined and ultimately destroyed by her contempt for his work. They had talked about divorce, but before they could act on it she had been killed in the accident that carried her car down the steep embankment of a California turnpike and into a sturdy spruce, one branch of which penetrated both the windshield and the pale pink arch of her throat.

  Beck had been thinking about the accident lately. For years he had tried very hard to forget it, but recent events had provoked some unavoidable speculation. At the time of the accident Leo had been five years old. "Do you remember the day your mother died?"

  "Not really."

  "You were with her."

  "Not in the car."

  No, not in the car, at least not when the accident happened. The story, as the State Police pieced it together from Leo's teary account, was that Mina had pulled over to the verge because the boy needed to pee. (They had been many miles from the nearest rest stop and Mina would never have insisted that Leo simply hold it in; in Mina's view, Leo's needs had to be met as soon as they were announced.) Leo had scuttled into the bushes and had probably been fumbling at his fly when a sixteen- wheel cargo truck taking tight curve at an unsafe speed sounded its air horn.

  The truck had missed the idling car by a generous margin, but Mina, constitutionally nervous and surely startled, had apparently put the vehicle into gear and tried to steer it farther from the road. Maybe she had stepped too hard on the accelerator, or maybe she had been looking over her shoulder instead of watching where she was going. In any case the car had gathered speed, sledding on wet summer grass to the brink of the embankment and then over it. When the police arrived they found Leo standing in the bushes, his jeans rank with urine and tears running down his face. He had been treated for shock before Beck was allowed to take him home.

  "Do you remem
ber where she was taking you that day?"

  "No. And I can't believe we're having this conversation."

  "She was taking you to the doctor."

  "I wasn't sick."

  "I know you weren't. I told Mina so. But she wouldn't believe me."

  Leo had been a healthy boy, but in Mina's eyes he was perpetually fragile and endangered. On that July day she had been concerned about a bump on Leo's leg where he had bruised it jumping a rail fence in a friend's backyard. Their family doctor had diagnosed a simple hematoma and told her the lump would disappear in a few days, but Mina somehow talked him into scheduling an X-ray at a local hospital. She had been driving Leo to that appointment on the day of the accident.

  "I know I haven't been particularly successful as a father." For nine years between Mina's death and the 2007 murders Beck had clothed, fed and schooled his son to the best of his ability. But it wasn't in his nature to be a nurturing parent. His methods had been strictly pedagogical. "I've always trusted you. That's not in question. But you have to take this test, Leo. We all do."

  "You think I might have killed my mother?"

  Beck wasn't sure how a five- year- old Leo could have accomplished that, given the circumstances. But Leo was the only witness to what had actually happened. "I just need you to roll up your cuff, son. I need to see a drop of blood. That's all."

  Leo looked at his father, at the syringe in his father's hand, at the pistol on his father's desk. "I don't know who the fuck you are anymore. Maybe I never did."

  Cassie joined Aunt Ris on the sofa opposite the door where Eugene Dowd stood guard. Beth sat cross- legged on the carpet, thumbing through a Spanish- language celebrity magazine; Thomas sat next to her, brooding.

  Cassie needed to tell Aunt Ris how she felt about Leo. She was on the verge of making a decision Aunt Ris would almost certainly resist, and Cassie wanted her aunt to understand it even if she didn't agree with it. She was afraid of many things at this moment, but she was most afraid of seeming ungrateful or unloving to the woman who had traveled so many thousands of miles to find her. "Volunteering to go in there first," she said, "that's the kind of thing I learned to expect from Leo—"

  "It bought us a little time but it doesn't really help. Not as long as Eugene's blocking the door. Maybe if we could get out an upstairs window or climb down from the balcony . . . but I'm not sure Thomas could manage it without falling."

  "It doesn't matter. I'll take the test. If Leo isn't hurt, I mean. If he says it's okay."

  "Maybe Leo trusts his father, but I don't. And I'm not sure I trust Leo."

  "I know him better than you do."

  "Cassie, listen. I know you've been close to Leo in the last few weeks. But he's his father's son. You have to look out for your own interests."

  "That's what I'm doing."

  "Maybe after we get back to the States—"

  "I'm not going back to the States. Not without Leo. Not unless Leo wants me to."

  There: she had said what she meant to say. Or at least stammered out a bare and inadequate summary of it. There was so much else. All the compelling evidence she had stored in her heart and her mind but could never share.

  After a long moment's silence Aunt Ris said, "Cassie, what do you really know about Leo Beck? All I know is that he's loyal to his father. And that he killed an innocent man."

  But Leo wasn't loyal to his father, not the slavish way Aunt Ris was implying. And as for the man Leo had killed, that act had been driven by fear and desperate circumstances, not carelessness or malevolence. What Aunt Ris could not have seen was Leo's grief and guilt. It was Cassie who had held Leo's head against her shoulder late one night in a room in Panama, stroking his hair as he admitted his anguish over the death he had caused; Cassie who had heard his confession ("I'm so sorry, I'm so fucking sorry,"), Cassie who had felt his tears against her skin. "I know I care about him. I know he cares about me. And I know what we've been through together."

  Aunt Ris looked more sad than angry. "Cassie, I—"

  She broke off at the sound of a knock at the front door. Eugene Dowd sprang to attention. He put his hand on his pistol and gestured to the others to keep quiet. There was no peephole in the door and no angle from which he could see the visitor through the window beside it. A few seconds passed before the knock came again, more urgently.

  "Okay," Dowd said. "You, you, you and you," cocking his finger at Beth, Thomas, Cassie and Aunt Ris, "upstairs, now. I'll signal if it's safe to come down. Go!"

  Beth stared blankly. Aunt Ris stood and took Thomas's hand. At the foot of the stairs she turned back and said, "Cassie— come on!"

  "No." Cassie was already moving toward the room where Leo and his father were conducting their test.

  "Cassie, please," Aunt Ris said, but she didn't wait, hurrying up the staircase and yanking a bewildered and frightened Thomas behind her.

  "I'm from the Port Authority," a male voice with a Chilean accent said from beyond the door. "I need to speak to Werner Beck on an urgent matter." Followed by more furious knocking.

  Dowd opened the door a crack and peered out, his had still grazing the grip of his revolver. "Show me some ID," he said.

  The door burst inward, knocking him to the floor.

  Beck realized he was imperfectly prepared for this impasse with his son. Leo sat angrily immobile, and for the moment Beck could do nothing but stare back. "You need to do this," he said, startled by the grief that groaned out of the hinge of his own voice, "or—" Or what?

  He was distracted by sounds from the adjoining room: a knock at the door, muted voices. Then the crash of a forced entry, more shouting. Beck dropped the syringe and reached for the pistol on the desk. But Leo acted first— vaulted from his chair and grabbed the gun.

  There was a gunshot from the front room, then a much closer crash as the door that connected this room to the alley behind the house was forced open and rebounded from its jambs. Beck saw Leo swing the pistol to confront the intruder from the alley, a man in civilian clothes carrying what looked like an automatic weapon. Leo fired before the intruder could pick a target. The intruder fell back, and Beck smelled the familiar fertilizer reek of sim fluids. He watched as Leo put a second killing shot into the sim's head, which stilled the squirming thing. No hesitation, Beck found himself thinking. He admired Leo's cool-headedness. It was a more satisfying vindication than any needle test could have been.

  Another gunshot came from the front room, followed by a third. "Give me the pistol," Beck said.

  Leo faced him with the weapon in his hand. It seemed to Beck that Leo was almost eerily calm, neither angry nor afraid. Beck put his hand out. Leo didn't lower the barrel.

  Beck felt the first bullet as a blow to his ribs, driving him backward. Then he was on the floor, breathless and bewildered. Leo stood over him, his face still utterly expressionless. Beck's hand fell on the syringe he had dropped. He surprised himself by flailing it at Leo's leg, burying the needle in Leo's thigh.

  Leo's second shot drove all thought to extinction.

  Cassie's fear had filled her to brimming. It roared in her ears like the screech of a power saw. She kept moving, but mindlessly, as if a clumsy puppeteer had taken control of her arms and legs. Events became a series of still frames projected behind her eyelids.

  Dowd on the floor, blocking the front door with his legs as a stranger struggles to push through . . .

  Cassie took a step toward the room where Leo was.

  Aunt Ris screaming Cassie's name even as she vanished beyond the upstairs landing, tugging Thomas behind her, Thomas looking back with his mouth a shocked O and eyes wide . . .

  Another step.

  Dowd raising his pistol and firing it: splintered wood and a noise like a blow to the head, but the stranger still ramming through as Dowd struggled to his feet and leveled the pistol again . . .

  Step.

  Beth forcing herself to her feet and staggering toward the stairs, her face a terrorized mask, all tooth and eye.
. . .

  Step.

  A different noise from the room where Leo was, thumping and a gunshot. . . .

  Which meant the house was being attacked from the alley as well as the street, but she didn't stop: her feet, her legs, her invisible puppeteer all wanted to carry her to Leo.

  Dowd firing again, the stranger tumbling into the room leaking red and green matter, but that only served to force the door wide open. Dowd shouting at Cassie and Beth: "Get down!"

  Cassie did not get down.

  Dowd peering around the door: "Shit, there's another one!"

  Two more steps, which put Cassie within reach of the room.