Burning Paradise Read online

  He tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  Half an hour later he was on the federal turnpike, cold air from an open window flushing out the stink of kerosene and worse things. He hadn't thought about a destination. He drove west in a river of red taillights, Nerissa asleep beside him, headed nowhere but away.

  P A R T T W O

  THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPIDER

  Consider a fisherman— let's say, a young man who

  owns a small boat and weaves his own nets.

  One sunny morning the fisherman sails out from

  the harbor and casts his net into the ocean. By the end

  of the day he has accumulated a fine catch of succulent

  fish. Back ashore, he sets aside a share of the bounty

  for his evening meal. He guts and cleans the fish and

  roasts them over an open fire on the beach. Perhaps he

  calls down his wife from their seaside cottage; perhaps

  the couple dine alfresco as the sun sets, gazing into

  each other's eyes; perhaps, nine months later and as an

  indirect result of their activities on that happy evening,

  the fisherman's wife bears a healthy child . . . but these

  plausible sequelae are not pertinent to our story.

  Now imagine another biological organism, in this

  case a spider: a common orb- weaver spider, of which

  there are some three thousand species worldwide and

  probably one or two in your own garden or backyard.

  Like the fisherman, the spider weaves a net (of sticky

  silk) and uses it to capture another species (a moth) as

  food. Like the fisherman, the spider prepares its meal

  before it consumes it— it pumps digestive enzymes

  into the body of the captive insect, sucks out the liquefied

  matter, and discards the empty husk, much as the

  fisherman discarded the inedible bones and organs of

  his fish. Perhaps the spider follows his meal by finding

  a mate, impregnating her, and offering his body to be

  devoured; perhaps the female then produces a pendulous,

  silk- encased sac of fertilized eggs . . . but all this,

  like the fisherman's amorous evening, is incidental to

  our story.

  The fisherman's tale is pleasant, even heartwarm

  ing. The spider's tale is viscerally disgusting. But from

  an objective point of view, nothing distinguishes one

  from the other but the details. A net is a net, whether

  it's made of nylon or spider silk. A meal is a meal.

  The important difference lies in the realm of sub

  jective experience. The fisherman's day is richly felt

  and easily imagined. The spider's is not. It is extremely

  unlikely that the simple fused ganglia of an arachnid

  generate much if anything in the way of psychological

  complexity. And an anthill— although it is also a functional

  biological entity, capable of its own equivalent of

  net- casting and food- gathering—has no centralized

  brain at all and no perceived experience of any kind.

  The rich inner experience of the world is central to

  human life and our appreciation of it. But the preponderance

  of life on Earth gets along perfectly well with

  out it. In this respect, human beings are a distinct

  minority. The fishermen of the world are greatly out

  numbered by the spiders.

  —Ethan Iverson, The Fisher man and the Spider

  11

  JORDAN LANDING, ILLINOIS

  "I'M NOT WHAT SHE SAID I AM," THOMAS insisted. "I'm not useless."

  Sitting across from him at a table in the diner, Cassie was inclined to believe it. Not for the first time, Thomas had surprised her.

  "Well, look who's back for supper," the waitress had said when they came in. "We close at seven," she added, "so don't dawdle. Fireworks start at eight— I guess you decided to stay for the fireworks?"

  "Yes, ma'am," Cassie said. Maybe it had been a mistake to come back to the same restaurant where they had bought breakfast. Being recognized was never good. But most of Jordan Landing's restaurants had already closed for Armistice Day, and the other exception, a Chinese restaurant called Lucky Paradise, didn't appeal to Thomas.

  The waitress brought meatloaf for Cassie and a hamburger and French fries for Thomas. Thomas tucked in eagerly. His appetite seemed to have come back, despite the trauma of the last few days. It was almost as if Beth's insult had invigorated him.

  Once they had retrieved the papers and the key from Werner Beck's hidden safe, they left the house by the rear door, hiked through a wooded allotment to another quiet residential street, then circled past the commercial section of town to the motel. Back in their room, Leo insisted on reading the papers his father had left him before he would discuss the contents. When he finished, he looked up and said, "We have to think about what happens next."

  "You could start," Beth suggested, "by telling us what's in those pages."

  "Well . . . lots," Leo said. "It's sort of a plan."

  "A plan for what?"

  "My father wrote this and left it where I could find it in case there was another attack on the Society. Over the last few years he learned some things he didn't share, things about the hypercolony. Ways we might be able to affect it. Hurt it."

  "Like?"

  Leo shook his head: "I need to go through it again. But what I can tell you is, if we do what my father wants us to do, it's going to be dangerous. You might not want to get involved."

  Beth rolled her eyes. "Fuck, Leo— I am involved."

  "I know, and you're right, but we're talking about a whole other level of commitment. I need a decision from you, too," addressing this to Cassie, "you and Thomas both. And even if you want to join in . . . I'm going to have to think about whether it's a good idea to let you do that."

  Cassie felt a twinge of foreboding. Something about the expression on Leo's face, the pinched V of his brows: what ever was in those papers had frightened him, but it had also filled him with a kind of grim hope.

  Beth remained sourly suspicious. "Are you even considering taking them along? Why? If this is so fucking dangerous. I mean, no offence," a brief and insincere glance at Cassie, "but they're baggage. She hasn't done anything more useful than pay for a few meals, and as for Thomas, he's a kid— he's useless."

  Cassie flushed at the injustice of it (as if Beth had performed some invaluable service!), but before she could answer Thomas piped up: "I'm not useless."

  "No?" A glimmer of cruelty in Beth's voice. "What have you done except sleep? Sleep and occasionally cry?"

  "Nothing—"

  "Right."

  "Nothing except what you guys asked me to do. I don't try to have things my own way. I don't complain." He added, his eyes fixed on Beth: "And I didn't try to phone anybody."

  Beth reddened and lunged forward— Cassie stepped in front of her brother— but Leo put a hand on Beth's shoulder to hold her back. "Come on," he said. "Let's talk about this."

  Meaning he wanted to talk to Beth alone. So Cassie grabbed her jacket and Thomas's and left the room with Thomas in tow. She said she'd find dinner and be back by nine.

  After the meal— the waitress hurried them out so she could close up "before the fun starts"— Cassie took her brother by the hand and walked with him to the park at the center of town.

  Henry Wallace Park, named for the former president, extended from the town hall on the north to the central post office on the south, and it was already filling with people. The park was pretty, Cassie thought, in a modest way— though probably at its best in summer, when the chinkapin oaks would be in full leaf and the air rich with the scent of mown grass. To night the skeletal limbs of the tree and the fading sunset created an atmosp
here more somber than the mood of the crowd. But that wasn't surprising. Armistice Day, ever since it had subsumed Thanksgiving as the nation's end- of- November holiday, had always been about defying the first chill of winter, even here in relatively balmy southern Illinois. Colored lanterns had been strung around the bandbox. Behind a cluster of picnic tables, cheerful men in flannel shirts and gaudy aprons dispensed hot dogs from a smoking grill. A banner over the bandstand announced 1914— ARMISTICE—2014, and a group of children in school uniforms waved laurel- wreath flags.

  Since 2007 Cassie had felt ambivalent about Armistice Day. Her high- school history classes had seemed overlaid with an invisible (and literally unspeakable) irony. Of course, the "century of peace and progress" hadn't been as peaceful as everyone liked to pretend. It was true that the Great War with all its horrors had served as midwife to the Benelux Pact, the European Coal and Steel Alliance, the Treaty of Rome— all those dull but worthy defenses against war, along with generations of European statesmen whose names Cassie would forever associate with the smell of chalk dust and pencil shavings: Lord Lansdowne, René Plevin, Benedetto Croce. But there had been the Russian civil war, which had simmered hot and cold for almost a decade before the Smallholders Party finally unseated that nation's creaking, brutal monarchy. There had been the countless border disputes that always threatened to erupt into something worse— Trieste, the Saarland, the Sudetenland. The ethnic "cleansings" that had persisted even after the European Accord on Human Rights. And even as the nations of Europe settled into the detente of the 1930s and 1940s, their reluctant retreat from empire had sparked countless Asian and African rebellions. It had been the Century of Peace only by contrast with what had gone before.

  But under all that was the unmentionable truth about the hypercolony. In her last year of school Cassie had written an essay about the social and political movements of pre-Armistice Europe, and she had been impressed by the arrogance with which certain famous men (Hegel, Marx, Treitschke) had claimed the mandate of history— a word they often capitalized, as if history were a physical force, as predictable and as irresistible as the tides. The twentieth century knew better. At least that was what the textbooks said. The twentieth century had discarded the naïve idea that history had a built-in destination.

  But history was exactly what the hypercolony had hijacked. It had grasped the raw and bloody meat of human history and shaped it to its own ends. What ever those ends might be.

  The park was getting too crowded for Cassie's comfort. She led Thomas across the street to the post- office grounds, a broad swale of grass where they could sit unobserved and watch the fireworks. The sky was dark now, the first stars beginning to glimmer. Thomas shivered and leaned into Cassie's shoulder. "What do you think?" she asked, her own thoughts still wandering. "Do you trust him?"

  "Trust who?"

  "Leo."

  Thomas pondered the question. Cassie liked this about her brother, that he was seldom quick to answer. Her own impulsiveness had gained her a reputation for being bright, while Thomas's reticence made some people think he was slow— but neither impression was really correct. Sometimes Cassie spoke without thinking. And her brother, she suspected, often thought without speaking.

  "Depends," Thomas said at last. "He's not mean. He thinks ahead. But that doesn't mean he's always right. Like when . . . you know."

  "When he shot that man," Cassie supplied.

  "Uh- huh."

  "Yeah, well . . . I'm sorry you had to see that."

  "Why shouldn't I see it?"

  Because knowing the truth doesn't always make you stronger. "Because you're twelve years old, for God's sake."

  "But I need to get used to it."

  "Used to what? People being killed? That's a horrifying thought!"

  Thomas gave her a hard look. "You don't think it'll happen again? I know Leo thought the guy was a sim. He never meant to kill a real person. But the Park Service man? Beth could have cracked his skull. Maybe that's what she meant to do. He could have died. Maybe he died anyway— we don't know."

  "We can't let ourselves get caught. If that happens, we lose, nobody wins."

  "I didn't say it was wrong. All I'm saying is, it could happen again. That or something like it. Probably will happen again, if we do what ever it is Leo wants us to do."

  "Well . . ." She couldn't honestly deny it. "Maybe."

  "Back in Buffalo, back when all I had to do was get up in the morning and go to school, maybe it mattered that I'm twelve years old. But it doesn't matter to the sims. It doesn't matter to the hypercolony. I don't want to be protected, Cassie. I want to fight."

  Thomas was a pudgy child and about as belligerent as a Quaker. He tended to cringe in the face of an argument. But the expression on his face was fierce now, almost steely. He did want to fight.

  He said, "I guess this is what it was like when—"

  The fireworks interrupted him. A rocket sizzled up from the park and burst into a brocade of silver stars. The noise echoed from the quarried stone of the post office building, a sound as hard as a fist.

  "What it was like when people went off to war," Thomas finished. "The big war, I mean."

  Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.

  "Leo's not perfect," Thomas said. "But who is? His father knows a lot, and his father trusts him. So yes. I guess I trust him. Do you trust him?"

  On what terms? To make a decision and follow it to the necessary conclusion? To embrace even violence, if violence was necessary? To go to war?

  Cassie surprised herself by nodding. "I do," she said.

  And in the end, what choice did she have? As recently as a few days ago she might have considered accepting the burden and promise of anonymity, might have been willing to settle for a circumspect, hidden life.

  But she was a criminal now, an accessory to murder. The authorities knew of at least one death. If the Park Service man had died, he would be the second victim . . . and if he hadn't died he would almost certainly have given the police a description of Leo, Cassie and Thomas. Local and regional police routinely shared reports by radio and fax, which meant those descriptions would have been available to the hypercolony, which meant it wasn't only the authorities who might be paying attention. "Anonymity" was no longer an option.

  The fireworks display began to build toward a climax, to the loud approval of the crowd in the park. Thomas watched gravely. The rocket's red glare, Cassie thought. Rockets: a war technology, drafted into the service of celebrating peace. Some members of the Correspondence Society had once believed that larger and more powerful rockets could be used to send scientific instruments (or even human beings!) into orbit around the Earth— or farther, as in the science fiction novels she occasionally liked to read. But the building of rockets bigger than toys had been prohibited in the disarmament protocols that followed the signing of the Armistice. And maybe that, too, was the work of the hypercolony: the hive defending its high- altitude territory.

  The air grew sulfurous with the reek of burning black powder. Mindful of the time, Cassie stood and brushed brown grass off her jeans as the band in the park struck up "God Bless America." She led Thomas away from the park, approaching the motel from the treed north side of the street, and she was glad she had taken that precaution: a cycling blue glow visible from a block away turned out to be the emergency lights of two police cars, parked outside the wing of the motel where she had left Beth and Leo a few hours earlier.

  Thomas had steadfastly refused to hold her hand on the walk back, but he reached for her hand now, and Cassie tugged him into the shadow of the trees where she was fairly certain they couldn't be seen. The presence of the police could only mean that their des
criptions had already been broadcast and that someone— the waitress at the restaurant, maybe, or the desk clerk at the motel— had recognized them and alerted the authorities. And if Leo and Beth had already been arrested—

  But a voice called her name, startling her, and she turned to find Leo and Beth sharing the darkness of this stand of oaks.

  "We saw the cops pull into the lot," Leo said. "We left by the fire door. I have the stuff my father left me. But most of our luggage is still in there. Some of our ID. And most of our cash, except for whatever you're carrying."

  Cassie felt a caustic weightlessness in her stomach. She felt the way she imagined a cornered animal must feel. "So what do we do?"

  "I guess we start," Leo said, "by stealing a car."

  12

  ON THE ROAD

  IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR LIFE— NO, THAT wasn't right.

  In the middle of the journey of our life (yes) I came to myself in a wood (but not just a wood; what was it?) a dark wood, a dark wood where the straight way was lost . . .