Burning Paradise Read online

  The green- on- the- inside man stood patiently on the porch. Ethan, inside, watched the man's image on a monitor mounted above the door and connected to the video camera hidden in the porch rafters. He tried not to wince when, again, the man looked directly into the camera lens.

  If this was a simulacrum, it was running some new kind of strategy, since it didn't appear to be armed and hadn't tried to disguise its approach. Ethan figured that made it more dangerous, not less.

  The camera hookup included a microphone and speaker. Never engage a sim in conversation was one of the rules Ethan had written for himself, based on his and Werner Beck's theories about the way the hypercolony functioned. But what was the alternative? Throw open the door and putting a load of buckshot into the face of someone who might, just might, be an innocent civilian?

  He keyed the microphone and said, "What ever you're selling, I'm not interested. This is private property. Please leave."

  "Hello, Dr. Iverson." The sim's voice was calm and reedy, with an upstate New York accent. "I know who you are, and you know what I am. But I'm not here to hurt you. We have a common interest. May I explain?"

  There was no mind in back of those words, Ethan reminded himself. Nothing but a series of highly- evolved algorithms aimed at achieving a strategic result. Engaging in dialogue with such a creature was no more useful than trying to fend off a scorpion by quoting Voltaire. Still, Ethan was curious in spite of himself. "Are you carrying a weapon?"

  The simulacrum gave the camera aningratiating smile. "No, sir, I am not."

  "You care to prove that? You can start by taking off your hat and coat."

  The simulacrum nodded and removed its hat. The sim had brown hair and a bald spot at the crown of its head. It shrugged off its jacket, folded it and placed it alongside the hat on a sun- faded Adirondack chair.

  "Now your shirt and pants," Ethan said.

  "Really, Dr. Iverson?"

  He didn't answer. The silence lengthened, until the simulacrum began unbuttoning its shirt. Shirt and pants joined hat and coat, revealing the sim's pale, pot- bellied, impeccably human- seeming body. "Shoes and socks, too," Ethan said.

  "It's chilly out here, Professor."

  But the creature cooperated. Which left it standing in nothing but a pair of white briefs. A monster in its underwear, Ethan thought.

  "Now may I come in and speak to you?"

  Ethan threw open the door, leaving only the wire screen between himself and the green- on- the- inside man. Ethan leveled his short- barrel shotgun at the creature's chest. The sim focused its attention on the gun. "Please don't shoot me," it said.

  "What do you want?"

  "A few minutes of your time. I want to explain something."

  "How about you give me the short version right now?"

  "You and some other members of the Correspondence Society are in real and immediate danger. That's not a threat. I'm not your enemy. We have mutual interests."

  "Why should I believe any of that?"

  "I can explain. Whether you believe me is up to you. May I come in?"

  Ethan kept the gun leveled and pulled open the screen door with one hand. "Move slowly."

  The simulacrum stepped across the threshold. "Are you going to keep that shotgun on me?"

  "I guess not." Ethan shifted the shotgun to his left hand and let the barrel droop.

  "Thank you."

  "This'll do fine," Ethan said, taking the shock pistol from where he had tucked it into his belt and forcing the prongs into the sim's flabby belly as he pulled the trigger.

  Three hundred kilovolts. The green- on- the- inside man dropped like a felled tree.

  3

  BUFFALO, NEW YORK

  THE WALK TO THE LOW- RISE APARTMENT building where Leo Beck lived kept Cassie warm in the face of the wind, but her little brother was beginning to show symptoms of anxiety. He had her left hand in a grip she was afraid would leave her bruised, though Thomas hadn't held hands with his sister since he was six years old. "Sun'll be up soon," she said, trying to distract him. They passed a ponderous slow- moving machine that sent torrents of soapy water into the sewer grates. "Street sweepers already at work, see?" Thomas shrugged.

  Buffalo was a prosperous city, but that prosperity had bypassed these old South Side buildings. Leo's low- rise squatted on its corner lot like a tired troll, tattooed by coal smoke that had drifted in from the mills and refineries of West Seneca and Lackawanna in the decades before the EPA mandates. She had to be careful here, in case the simulacra had come or were coming for Leo. She tugged open the sheet- metal outer door and stepped into the foyer of the building. The air inside was warm but smelled like cabbage and sour milk. She examined the bank of electrical bells— a row of buttons with the names of tenants printed beside them. One of the buttons had come loose and dangled from its socket like a poked- out eye. Just below it was the button marked BECK, LEO.

  "Is it safe here?" Thomas asked, echoing Cassie's own thought.

  During their walk she had told Thomas about the sim who had been killed by a car on Liberty Street. What it meant was that she and Thomas had to get away even if Aunt Ris couldn't join them. So where are we going? Thomas had asked, but Cassie didn't have an answer. It depends.

  I have to go to school.

  Not anymore. We're sort of on vacation.

  But Thomas was too perceptive to be easily consoled. And no, it wasn't safe here; she couldn't honestly say so. Leo Beck might be dead on the floor of his single- bedroom apartment for all Cassie knew. But it was her duty as a Society survivor to warn the nearest potential victim, if that was possible. She kept an eye on the stairs beyond the foyer's inner door, ready to run at the first sight of a suspicious stranger. She pushed the buzzer again.

  After a moment Leo answered, and he wasn't pleased. "Whoever the fuck you are, push that buzzer one more time and I'll be down there kicking your sorry ass."

  Thomas went owl- eyed. "It's Cassie Iverson," Cassie said hastily. "I need to come in, Leo."

  Silence. After a long pause the electronic lock on the inner door clicked open. Cassie hustled Thomas up the stairwell to a second- floor corridor lined with peeling floral wallpaper. Leo's apartment was 206. She knocked lightly, not wanting to wake the neighbors.

  But it wasn't Leo who opened the door— it was Beth Vance.

  Cassie supposed she shouldn't have been surprised. She had seen Leo and Beth together at the last survivors' meeting, acting more than friendly toward each other. Beth was the daughter of John Vance, whose wife Amanda had been a tenured professor at NYU and a member of the Correspondence Society. Amanda Vance had been one of the victims of the 2007 attacks.

  Beth was only a year older than Cassie, though she tried to appear vastly more sophisticated (and usually succeeded, Cassie had to admit). Beth was tall, dramatically skinny, and she wore her straw- yellow hair fashionably short. This morning she was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt that looked as if she had just thrown them on. The shirt might have been one of Leo's. She gave Cassie a condescending glare.

  "I need to talk to Leo," Cassie said.

  Beth rolled her eyes but called out, "Yeah, it's the Iverson girl. And her little brother."

  Leo's voice came from elsewhere in the apartment: "Her what?"

  "Little brother!"

  As if Beth didn't know Thomas's name.

  Cassie pushed past Beth and tugged Thomas inside. Leo came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing black denim pants and a sleeveless undershirt. He was twenty- one years old and a little over six feet tall. Conventionally good- looking but there was something odd about his eyes, Cassie had often thought: the way they turned down at the corners, as if they had been installed upside- down. It made him look smug.

  But he wasn't actually smug and he certainly wasn't stupid. He looked at Cassie, at Thomas, read their expressions, then took a breath and said, "Oh, fuck. It's happening again, isn't it?"

  Cassie managed to nod. "Again."

  "And you ca
me here first?"

  "Aunt Ris is out. Yeah. We haven't talked to anyone else."

  She told him the story of what she had seen from the kitchen window, sparing no details even though Thomas grew visibly more frightened as she spoke.

  "Okay," Leo said, frowning massively. "Thank you, Cassie." He turned to Beth. "Anything you want to keep," Leo told her, "get it quick and throw it in the car."

  "The car?"

  "We're leaving."

  Thomas sat next to her on Leo's grubby sofa while Leo and Beth finished dressing.

  She wondered how much he understood. Aunt Ris hadn't neglected Thomas's education. He knew about the 2007 massacre, at least in general terms. He knew he shouldn't discuss certain subjects, like the death of his parents, outside of the family. He knew the suitcase under his bed had been put there for a purpose. That burdensome knowledge had made him more reserved and cautious than most twelve-year-olds. Thomas seldom talked about any of this, but he occasionally came to Cassie with questions that troubled him: Is it true the radiosphere is alive? Or, How does the hypercolony hear us when we talk on the phone? Or, Why does it want to kill people? Cassie had always tried to answer as honestly as she knew how. Which meant Thomas had to be satisfied with a whole lot of I-don't-know.

  Beth remained skeptical, and Leo Beck came out of the bedroom still talking down her objections. "Cassie wouldn't lie about something like this," Leo said, gratifyingly. "It's code- fucking- red." He jammed a few items of canned food into a sports bag along with his spare clothes. "We knew this could happen." He added, "At least we're together," which Cassie guessed was meant to mollify Beth, though she gave him nothing in return but a queasy stare. The process of packing up was brief and efficient. Leo didn't seem to own much, from what Cassie could see of his apartment, apart from a couple of shelves of books. All Beth had was her overnight bag, which Cassie suspected amounted to little more than a makeup kit, emergency tampons and a couple of condoms.

  "So where's the car?" Beth asked.

  "Parked a couple of blocks away. Anything else you think we need?"

  Beth looked around unhappily, then shook her head.

  "Okay. Let's go."

  "What about them?" Beth asked— rudely, but Cassie had been wondering the same thing.

  "Can't leave 'em here. Is that all right, Cassie? Do what you like, but you're probably better off with us than out in the street."

  "Yes," Thomas said before Cassie could answer. Cassie just nodded. Leo knew the drill as well as anyone; what ever else he might be, he was the son of Werner Beck, the most influential man in the Society. They would be safer together.

  They left the building. Outside, the first light of morning raked the street. A few workers had begun to trickle out of these old residential buildings, burly men and a few women, most of them bound for the Lackawanna and West Seneca production lines. Once, driving through this part of the city with Aunt Ris, Cassie had wondered aloud whether the men then trudging home really believed the world was as prosperous and forward- moving as her high- school civics classes had made it sound. "Probably not," Aunt Ris had said. "They don't look terribly inspired, do they? They're not rich by a long stretch. But they have jobs. The mills and machine shops pay a living wage plus benefits. A lot of these men could probably afford to live somewhere better if not for liquor or alimony or bad luck. Their lives might improve in the long run. And if they need help, they can get it." In other words, the civics classes had been mostly right.

  Aunt Ris had always been scrupulous about giving the devil his due.

  Leo's car was an old Ford, its brown paint bubbled with rust. It was probably older than Thomas, but it was the best transportation Leo could afford on the money he made at the restaurant where he worked nights. His father, though famously wealthy, hadn't set him up with a fancy income. But as of now, Cassie thought, Leo had spent his last day bussing tables at Julio's. She heaved her suitcase and Thomas's into the empty trunk of the car, next to Beth and Leo's few things, then slid into the backseat with Thomas.

  "So where are we going?" Beth asked.

  It was a good question. Cassie waited to hear the answer. Sooner or later she would have to ask herself the same thing.

  "First stop, your place. See if your father's okay. What we do then depends on what we find."

  Ten Society families had fled to Buffalo after the massacre. Most had been associated with (or had lost loved ones associated with) Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or UMass. Aunt Ris had known them all socially, and it was she who had organized the exodus.

  All those families had sustained attacks. All were grieving for lost husbands or fathers, mothers or wives. Wisely, they had been unwilling to go on living in the homes where their loved ones had been killed. They may not have been in immediate danger— the attacks had been narrowly targeted at active members of the Society— but they had been made exquisitely aware of their vulnerability. The last generally- distributed Society document (a letter to survivors from Werner Beck) had been laced with dire warnings and tips on preserving anonymity.

  There were other such enclaves of survivors around the country and elsewhere in the world. Only a shadow of the old Correspondence Society still existed, but the emotional and occasional financial support it provided had been invaluable. Survivor gatherings were the only occasions when grief and anger that had to remain hidden from strangers could be openly expressed and understood.

  But the need for secrecy was always corrosive, especially for the children of such families. Cassie and Thomas fell into that category. So did Leo and Beth.

  School, for instance. Cassie had attended Millard Fillmore Secondary School until her graduation last year, and every day had brought some sharp reminder that she was an outsider only passing for normal, a refugee from a different and darker country. History classes had been a particular torment. Before the massacres of 2007, she had been allowed by her parents to believe the narrative of technological and social progress the textbooks loved to portray: the discovery of the radio-propagative layer above the Earth's atmosphere (the so-called radiosphere) in the 1890s, the Great War and its aftermath, the abolition of segregation in the U.S. in the 1930s, the European and Eurasian peace pacts, the gender liberation of the 1950s . . . above all, the comforting near- certainty that the world was every day a little wealthier and a little more just. It was only after the death of her parents that Cassie had been introduced to the real truth: that there was an invisible hand at work in human history, indifferent despite its apparent benevolence, often cruel, occasionally murderous.

  That knowledge had set her apart from her classmates. Her few friendships were really just temporary alliances with other social outsiders— with Annie Jessup, for instance, who wore a stainless- steel leg brace; with Patrice Kossuth, who stuttered uncontrollably on the rare occasions when she attempted to speak. And what good was friendship when Cassie was obliged to conceal so much about herself? The only people of Cassie's age to whom she could truly unburden herself were the children of the Society, who all had stories like hers and whose sympathy was therefore generic and often insincere.

  Despite all that, she had methodically planned a future for herself. Since she left high school she had been working as a counter clerk at a Main Street department store called Lassiter's, saving tuition and book fees for a semester at NYU. Her ambition had been to take a biology major that would ultimately allow her to focus on the study of invertebrates: her uncle's career and his books on entomology had been an obvious inspiration. She would get a post- graduate degree, maybe end up teaching at some regional college; she would lead a quiet but useful life and make a modest contribution to the sum of human knowledge. She had imagined herself living in a book- lined room on a tree- lined campus, with a window through which she could watch the seasons change. She would be alone, perhaps, but she would also be contented, useful, safe.

  It was a stupid delusion, and she blushed at the thought of it. Because now the green-
on- the- inside men had come back, and there would be no sheltered room, no window from which to watch the winter snow. The events of the last few hours meant she would lead the rest of her life in strict anonymity, perhaps under an assumed name, taking the sort of jobs that required no experience or documentation, probably living in a sequence of rented apartments in a sequence of obscure towns. And the same, she realized with belated anguish, would be true of Thomas.

  Thomas put his head against her shoulder and closed his eyes. The motion of the car and the emotional overload of the morning had made him sleepy. That was a blessing, Cassie thought. She stroked his hair and let him doze.