Burning Paradise Read online

  Leo came at him and shoved him against the cinderblock wall, showing him the pistol. "You've been following us," he said, and Cassie heard a thrum in his voice that might have been anger but more likely was fear. Now that the confrontation had started Beth stood up boldly and went to stand behind Leo; Cassie took a few steps in that direction as if drawn by some poorly- understood duty, though she told Thomas to keep out of sight.

  "You're a fucking sim," Beth said, "aren't you?"

  The man's eyes, watery behind the lenses of his glasses, blinked frantically. "I'm— what?" He looked at Leo, at the pistol. "What do you want? You want money?" He reached for his wallet.

  "Keep your hands down," Leo said. "We know you've been following us."

  "Following you?" The man seemed about to deny it; then he said, "But it's not— I mean, yeah, I heard you asking directions to the Interstate in the lobby at the motel. That's where I'm going. I mean, I'm shitty at following directions. So I thought if I kept your car in sight . . . ? That's all it was, really. So I wouldn't get lost! Is that a problem? I apologize. Like I said, if you want money—"

  "Fuck your money!" Beth said. She stood next to Leo. "He's lying. He's a sim."

  "Maybe," Leo said, "but—"

  "But what? You need to take care of it!"

  "Shoot him?"

  "Yes! Fuck! Shoot him! Now, while there's nobody around!"

  The wind blew and the trees on the hillside rattled their leafless limbs. Cassie felt a hand on her arm. Thomas. She bent down and whispered, "Go to the car. Get in the backseat. Get down. Close your eyes. Do it!"

  The man with the hat and eyeglasses was beginning to look desperate. He held his hands out, palms up, and his face was as pale as the haze hanging over the river valley. "Come on," he said. "Hey."

  Leo aimed the pistol at the center of the man's body. Leo's face became a mask of concentration. His eyes narrowed. He was going to shoot, Cassie realized. He had seen the man following them, he had passed a verdict, and he was going to shoot.

  "If you have to shoot him," Cassie said, "shoot him in the leg."

  Leo's hand wavered. Cassie couldn't look away from the gun, Leo's knuckles pale and pink against the anodized metal.

  "If he's a sim," she said, "we'll know. If not . . . maybe it won't kill him."

  Leo nodded and lowered the pistol, but the sound of the gunshot when it came was so loud it made her gasp. It seemed to surprise Leo, too. He stumbled back a step, looking at the weapon as if it had burned his hand. A flock of starlings erupted from a distant tree like sudden smoke.

  The man with the big glasses and the old- fashioned hat dropped to the ground. His mouth was open but no sound came out, and one hand groped at the cinderblock wall of the restroom before it reached for his leg. His right leg was shattered below the knee and Cassie was shocked to see the glint of an exposed bone. Blood pulsed from the wound in frantic gouts.

  There was nothing green inside him.

  Cassie's stomach clenched. She forced herself to stand and watch, furiously scrubbing her watering eyes. Leo was immobilized, staring. Beth had backed away and stood with her spine against the wall of the restroom.

  Cassie spared a glance for the road— still empty.

  The man on the ground clutched his leg at the thigh with both hands. His eyes had rolled up, showing the whites. "Guh," he said— some senseless grunt.

  "Oh, he's not," Leo whispered, "he's not . . ."

  Not a sim. Cassie felt a weightless sense of clarity, as if the world had grown simple and brightly lit. "Okay, we have to stop the bleeding."

  "How?"

  She had taken a first- aid course at school but it hadn't covered gunshot wounds. "Tourniquet," she guessed. "Make a tourniquet."

  Leo nodded and took off his belt and bent down to wrap it around the wounded man's leg. The man didn't resist. He was barely moving now. His big glasses were askew on his face and his hat had rolled to the verge of the slope.

  Cassie remembered what she had said to Leo (shoot him in the leg) and felt sick all over again. She had never seen a person shot at close range. She had imagined a neat hole, not this wholesale butchery. But if she hadn't said anything it would have been worse, wouldn't it?

  Leo lifted the wounded leg and doubled his belt around the man's blood- soaked pants, but his hands shook and he couldn't find a notch for the buckle. "Here, let me," Cassie said. Where had this absurd calmness come from? She bent down, cinched the belt tight. The rhythmic pulse of blood from the wound began to slow. But the damage was awful. An artery must have been cut. The man needed medical help, urgently.

  There was a payphone just inside the restroom entrance: Cassie could see it from where she knelt. "Beth," she said. "Call the police."

  "What?"

  "He needs an ambulance! Call the police!"

  Beth looked at the payphone but didn't move. "I don't think we should do that. Won't we get arrested? We'll get arrested!"

  "Beth, he's dying." The man's head was tilted back, his mouth was open, he was breathing in gasps, like snores, and although his eyes were open they weren't looking at anything. Cassie put a finger against his throat to feel his pulse. His skin was cool but slick with sweat. The beat she felt was erratic.

  "Okay, wait," Leo said. "Cassie . . . I didn't mean to hurt him so bad."

  "I know."

  "He was following us. He admitted it."

  "I know! He needs help."

  "We could . . . maybe we could call from somewhere down the road."

  And get away cleanly, he meant. Yes, but: "There's no time. Look at him, Leo!"

  "There's nothing we can do for him."

  "Of course not! He needs a doctor!" Then she understood: "You want to drive away and leave him here?"

  "I don't want to do it. I don't think we have a choice."

  "No! We shot him and we have to help him! Now! Now! Right away!"

  "Cassie, listen to me . . . what about Thomas?"

  She looked around guiltily. Her brother was standing back by the car. Not close enough to see the man's injury in any detail, but close enough that he must have witnessed the shooting. (The killing, she corrected herself: that's what it would be if they abandoned the man here.) But yes, it was true, if the police came, if they were arrested, who would look after Thomas? How could she protect him?

  The man on the ground took a gurgling breath and fell silent. His hands ceased moving and his eyes looked at blankly at the sky. Cassie registered the sudden slackness of his body. Her head filled with the sound of the wind in the leafless trees.

  "Is he dead?" Beth asked.

  Cassie felt for a pulse again, pointlessly. She stood up and backed away.

  "We have to hide him," Leo said. "He'll be found sooner or later. Better for us if it's later."

  "Hide him?" Beth asked.

  Leo nodded at a place where the plastic safety barrier had been bent to the ground by weather or reckless tourists. "Help me," he said. "Beth?"

  Beth swallowed hard but nodded.

  Cassie watched in disbelief as they took the man's arms and began to drag him toward the slope. The man's shoes left an irregular trail of blood. Cassie scuffed gravel over the pond of blood where the man had been shot, concealing the evidence. Soon her own shoes were spattered with blood. Were they forgetting something?

  "His hat," she said.

  Beth came back for the man's hat and tossed it toward the distant valley. It sailed on the wind and then dropped out of sight.

  "Now roll him down," Leo said.

  "We should go through his pockets first."

  Cassie turned away. She couldn't bear to watch Leo turning the corpse on its side so Beth could extract the dead man's wallet. She walked back to the car, to Thomas, trying not to hear the sound (though she could hardly ignore it) of the man's body tumbling downhill through clumps of wild sumac and brittle brown grass. The noise dwindled and finally stopped. Somewhere in the woods a crow called out.

  Later—after dark, the r
oad unwinding under a shimmer of stars— Beth summoned the courage to look at what she had taken from the dead man's pockets and stuck into her purse: A leather billfold. A couple of hundred dollars in cash. And a prescription bottle of a drug called Bisoprolol. "It's a heart drug," Leo said. "He must have had a condition."

  Leo dumped the billfold and the pills (all identifying labels removed) into a trash bin outside a post office in a nameless little town where all the stores were closed for the night. Later, at a twenty- four- hour gas station convenience shop off the Interstate, Beth used some of the dead man's cash to buy a selection of fresh and dry food, which she secured in the trunk of Leo's car.

  Cassie sat in the backseat with Thomas as they drove on. During the night Thomas asked her whether the man with big glasses was really dead. "Yes," she told him. No point in lying. Thomas could be protected from many things, but not from this obvious truth.

  Since then her brother hadn't said a word. He sat slumped with his head against Cassie's shoulder, eyes closed, not asleep but not entirely awake, hiding in his own somnolent body as the car rolled on. He was the only innocent one among them, Cassie thought. She hadn't been able to protect him from what they had done. But at least she had kept his hands clean.

  8

  RURAL VERMONT

  OF ALL THE NIGHTMARISH EVENTS OF THE last three days, Nerissa thought, this had to be the most grotesquely surreal: descending step by step into the cellar of her ex- husband's farm house, where something both more and less than human was waiting to be interrogated.

  She was physically and emotionally exhausted. Coming home to find Cassie and Thomas missing from the apartment had revived every fear she had so carefully repressed since the slaughter of '07. During the drive from Buffalo she had been reluctant even to stop for gas, and when she did eventually stop she found herself wondering whether the station attendant (some acned teenager) was one of them. It was the kind of reflexive paranoia that might have protected Thomas and Cassie, had she practiced it consistently. But after seven quiet years she had relaxed her vigilance. A night out, she had thought, was a small thing to ask. A well- earned reward, in fact, after everything she had done (and done without complaint) for her sister's children. She deserved it, no?

  The empty apartment, the packed bag absent from its place under Cassie's bed, the ransacked kitchen: that was her answer.

  But she would find Cassie and Thomas, she promised herself. She would protect them. Bring them home. And to hell with Werner Beck and the Correspondence Society's rules of conduct. The Correspondence Society was dead. The only thing left was family. The only thing that mattered.

  Ethan walked ahead of her down the wooden stairs. He was still talking about the sim, how it couldn't be trusted, but his words were only an ambient buzz. Nerissa didn't care. She just wanted to see the monster. To force some kind of truth from its stupid, lying mouth.

  Of course she knew Ethan was right: the simulacrum— that is to say, the hypercolony of which it was a part— couldn't be trusted. It wasn't a human being. It wasn't even an animal. Ethan and Werner Beck had proved that.

  Ethan had told Nerissa about the Society shortly after they were engaged to be married. He had confessed his membership as if it were an embarrassing truth she needed to know about him, like a minor case of herpes. At first she had thought of the Society as something trivial— Masonry for mathematicians, an academic boys' club with the pretense of a conspiracy as its binding secret. The ideas he had blushingly put forward seemed hardly credible. The radio- reflective layer (itself only an engineer's abstraction as far as Nerissa was concerned) as a living thing? Exercising subtle control over human history? Even if she had wanted to believe it, how could she?

  She hadn't taken it at all seriously until he escorted her to his lab and showed her his cell cultures. He had been working with samples recovered from Antarctic ice cores, ostensibly studying airborne pollen deposited by ancient snowfalls. (All Society research needed a legitimizing pretext, he said. Research that cut too close to certain subjects had a way of losing funding or getting derailed during peer review. Careers had been devastated, back in the days before Society members learned to be discreet. But the names he cited were only vaguely familiar to her: who was Alan Turing, for instance?) The pollen was present in the ice cores, and Ethan had dutifully categorized the samples by species, teasing out the implications for the ecology of pollinating insects; his findings had eventually appeared in Ecological Entomology. What he didn't report were the tiny granules he had also isolated from the ice: microscopic spherules of what appeared to be carbonaceous chondrite, enclosing traces amounts of complex organic matter.

  The spherules were few in absolute number and easily overlooked, hardly distinguishable from dust, but consistently present in a thousand years of deposited ice. The Society's hypothesis was that they had sifted down through the atmosphere from the radio- reflective layer, the radiosphere— that the radiosphere itself was an orbital cloud of trillions of such granules, evenly distributed around the Earth. The cloud was too diffuse to block more than a fraction of incoming sunlight or to detect with the naked eye, but the distributed mass of it, Ethan had calculated, must be immense.

  Without its enclosing membrane of rock, the fraction of organic matter preserved in the spherules decayed on exposure to air. But Ethan had been able to accumulate measurable amounts of it in chambers bathed in inert gases and maintained at temperatures and radiation levels commensurate with the vacuum of space. Add a few molecules of carbon and ice, and the substance would bind to them. Give it a sufficient substrate of raw material and it self- assembled new rocky granules, and the new granules revealed more complexity than the degraded ones isolated from the ice cores: complex crystallizations, venous lacings of carbon and silicon . . .

  By the time of their marriage— an unspectacular civil ceremony followed by a catered dinner at a country- club function room— Ethan had shared samples of his cultures with Werner Beck and with a few of what he called "the digital computation people" for further study. And although Nerissa tried to wall herself off from the implications of her husband's work, she had to admit it was a momentous and disturbing idea— that some ancient and actually cosmic force was screwing around with human communications. But what did that really mean, in practical terms? If the relative prosperity and tranquility of the twentieth century was a product of that intervention (which the Society had long believed), was it sensible to inquire too closely? Humanity's earlier track record was hardly inspiring: endless cycles of war, famine, superstition, pestilence . . .

  But these ideas were remote and conjectural and ultimately easy to set aside. Nerissa had managed to go about the business of her life— her teaching position at UMass, a book in progress, her newly- minted marriage— without giving more than a moment's occasional thought to the nature of the fucking radiosphere.

  It had seemed like a reasonable accommodation, in the years before the bloodshed began.

  Ethan told her the monster in his cellar called itself Winston Bayliss. Nerissa wondered how it had come by the name. Had there been a real Winston Bayliss, perhaps killed and replaced by the sim? Or had the monster invented its name out of a statistical analysis of human nomenclature?

  No way of knowing. And it didn't matter.

  The monster wore a pair of white briefs, its pale belly drooping over the elastic waistband. Its torso, arms and legs were duct- taped to a heavy wooden chair, effectively immobilizing it. The monster lifted its head as she approached. It wore the bland face of a middle- aged white male, not unhealthy but soft around the edges. Of course, its appearance meant nothing. The weary expression on its face meant nothing. Its beseeching eyes meant nothing. The creature's body was simply a display surface, a signaling mechanism. In a human being the look it gave her might have meant, I've been through a lot. I'm all tired out. But from the monster all it signified was an attempt to arouse and exploit her sympathy.

  Promptly—as if the monster had rea
d her mind, though really it was just interpreting her body language— the pudgy face turned smooth and indifferent. As if to say: You know what I am, and I won't try to fool you. And that was also a lie, albeit a subtler one.