Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Cassie followed Leo upstairs, to a room that must have been Beck's study. An oaken desk shared the space with bookcases and filing cabinets. The filing cabinets had been rifled; the drawers were open, some pulled from their cabinets and dumped on the floor. "What happened here?" Beth asked.

  Leo shrugged. "Somebody was looking for something, obviously."

  "You think they found it?"

  "Couldn't say. But I know a place they probably didn't look."

  Downstairs to the small living room, which Werner Beck had furnished in a spare, almost offhand style: a plain sofa, a simple coffee table, no TV set or radio. Leo shoved the coffee table against the wall and pulled up the cloth rug, exposing the planked flooring. He examined the bare floor for a moment, then put his finger in a knothole and yanked.

  A square chunk of flooring three planks wide came up in his hand. It had been set so finely that the seams hadn't shown. Underneath, in the space between the floorboards and the concrete foundation, was a small steel safe, the dial of its combination lock facing upward. "He told me he put this here," Leo said. "In case something happened to him."

  "So what's inside?" Beth asked.

  "What I would need. That's all he ever said. He told me where to look for it and he told me to memorize the combination. Nothing else."

  He turned the dial, muttering the numbers to himself. Cassie crouched behind him next to Beth, peering over his shoulder as he opened the door on its oiled hinges. He reached inside and pulled out a fat manila envelope.

  Leo emptied the contents of the envelope onto the coffee table. Not much there, Cassie thought wonderingly:

  A map.

  A handwritten list of what appeared to be town or cities.

  A few typed pages, stapled at the corner.

  And a key.

  10

  RURAL VERMONT

  ETHAN TOOK NERISSA TO THE FARM HOUSE attic and checked his surveillance feeds. Two sims were approaching from the direction of the main road. The afternoon light was fading but he could clearly see the automatic rifles the creatures held at a ready angle. Only members of the armed forces were legally permitted to carry such weapons, but these two men, roughly the same apparent age as the creature in the cellar, seemed not to be soldiers. One wore a business suit, the other wore blue jeans and corduroy shirt. They moved in parallel on opposite sides of the access road, keeping to the shadows of the trees.

  That was the front of the house. Out back, the surveillance cameras had apparently shut down, leaving Ethan entirely blind in that direction. But he could only address one problem at a time. He took one of the three hunting rifles he kept in a rack on the wall and carried it to the west- facing window. He had replaced the original window and frame with a sheet of double-thick birchwood ply into which he had cut an embrasure large enough to allow him to sight along the barrel of the rifle.

  The first target would be the easiest. He waited until the sim in the business suit reached the clearing in front of the house. There was no way to approach the house without crossing that empty space. The sim left the cover of the trees, running. Ethan's first shot split the sim's skull, spilling a cascade of green matter threaded with blood.

  The next shot wouldn't be as easy. The second sim, the one in blue jeans, broke from the woods before his companion had finished falling. He veered away from the front of the house, attempting to get out of Ethan's range. The narrow embrasure in the plywood afforded Ethan some protection, but it also restricted his field of fire. He brought the rifle hard up against the wood and squeezed the trigger.

  He hit the target, but he hit it low. Ethan guessed he had clipped the simulacrum's spine, because the creature fell and couldn't stand up again. After a moment it abandoned the struggle and used its arms to drag itself toward the house. Ethan managed to put a second bullet in the sim's neck. Gouts of blood and green matter spewed from the wound and the creature stopped moving.

  But Ethan still didn't know what was happening out back, where the cameras had been destroyed or deactivated. He ran to the east- facing window and leveled his rifle, pulling away in time to avoid a hail of bullets from a third sim's automatic weapon. Plywood splinters peppered his face and a flurry of dust and debris showered down from the attic ceiling. He glanced back to make sure Nerissa hadn't been hit. She was still standing, unhurt but obviously terrified. He told her to get down on the floor.

  The sim who fired on him had been crossing the open space in back of the house and was out of sight now, but Ethan didn't have to wonder where it had gone: he heard the sound of the back door being kicked in. The creature had entered the house.

  Everything Ethan knew about the anatomy of the simulacra he had learned from Werner Beck. Werner Beck had not only survived the attempt on his life in 2007, he had managed to wound and disarm both of his attackers. And in the days that followed Werner Beck had taken his captive sims apart— piece by piece, making notes.

  He had distributed a monograph on the subject to all the survivors loyal or reckless enough to stay in touch with him. Ethan had a copy in his files. Anatomical Details of the Artificial Human Beings, with diagrams and photographs. The photographs had been particularly disturbing: two sims, still alive, mounted on dissection boards and opened from the chest down. The skin of their torsos had been peeled back and pinned in place like the pages of a book, ribs and bloody musculature fully exposed, several small but functional human organs partially removed. Ethan had forced himself to memorize the details. Sacs of green matter, essentially identical to the contents of the cells Ethan had cultured from Antarctic ice cores, occupied most of the gut and extended into the extremities including the skull. The skull sac was surrounded by a web of nervous tissue that presumably performed some of the functions of a human brain. The scaffolding of bone was indistinguishable from a human skeleton. In the abdominal and chest cavities, dwarfish human organs (a heart hardly bigger than a golf ball, a liver that might have been taken from a newborn infant) served the shell of flesh that gave the sims their human appearance. Cut a sim and it would bleed. Cut deeply and it would bleed green.

  The green material was complex but amorphous, the same no matter where in the body it was located. That meant the sims were less vulnerable to some kinds of physical damage than human beings were. Attacking one with a knife would be nearly suicidal. A bullet through the soft parts would only slow it down, while a bullet through the spine would drop it in its tracks without killing it. A shot to the head was the best bet, Werner Beck had written, since the skein of nervous tissue under the skull was an essential interface, allowing the simulacrum to control its body.

  Even then, death might not be instantaneous. Beck's captive sims had survived for days as he systematically cut and flayed them— they had pretended pain at first, and when the pretense failed they lapsed into an observant silence. Loss of blood eventually killed one of them: its small heart simply stopped beating; the other sim died when Beck experimentally fired a bullet into its skull.

  Ethan traded his rifle for a pistol, then took a second one from its rack and offered it to Nerissa. "You know how to use that?" She nodded: like many other survivors she had taken a course after the

  2007 massacre. Her hands shook, but she checked the pistol to ensure that it was loaded, then clicked off the safety.

  "Stay here. Wait for me." And shoot anything that comes up in my place, he didn't have to add. Then he opened the attic door and moved down the narrow stairs to the farm house's second story, a hallway with more stairs at the far end. Daylight was fading and the hall was dim. Ethan paused every few paces, listening for sounds from below but hearing little more than the pounding of his own pulse.

  If he had any advantage it was his intimate knowledge of the farm house, its angles, its shadows, its exposed places and its high ground. He hugged the left- hand wall until he reached the landing of the stairway, then leaned into the emptiness beyond the railing with his pistol sighted toward the front door. Nothing. But there was a rattle th
at might have come from the kitchen.

  Ethan's respect for his opponent was complete. He thought again of Werner Beck dissecting the captured sims, an act that seemed both cruel and vengeful until you realized it was neither— the sims felt no pain and were indifferent to indignity. They weren't even individuals, in the human sense. They even were less autonomous than ants or termites, mere extensions of the superorganism that had created them: massive, complex, far- traveled, ancient. Not even remotely human, and above all, not to be underestimated.

  Ethan hurried down the stairs, mindful that he was exposed to fire from the sim's automatic rifle. From the bottom of the stairs he could see most of the farm house's main room, which was empty. Which left the kitchen. The door to the kitchen was closed. He couldn't remember if he had closed it himself. He had no choice but to announce his presence by throwing it open, pistol ready, thinking with some fraction of his mind of Nerissa: she was armed but terrified, and if he died here—

  But the kitchen too was empty. The back door was askew in its frame, hanging by one hinge where the sim had kicked it in. A trail of muddy boot prints led from the broken door to the entrance to the cellar. Ethan looked at the stairwell with dismay. He could only conclude that the sim was down there with Winston Bayliss.

  Move, he told himself. He had no choice but to attempt the cellar stairs.

  He was halfway down when he saw the sim at the foot of the stairs with its back to him, looking utterly human with its upturned collar, its sagging blue jeans, the nascent bald spot at the crown of its head. The automatic rifle was raised, but not in Ethan's direction. The sim began to turn as Ethan's foot hit a creaking riser. But it was no faster than a mortal man. Ethan had been granted that rare gift, an easy target. He squeezed the trigger of the pistol.

  Simultaneously, the sim began firing into the darkness of the cellar. In this enclosed space the sound was deafening. Ethan flinched, but not before his bullet took the simulacrum at the base of its skull. The sim's automatic rifle sprayed a few more bullets, then fell silent. The sim toppled over, inert.

  Ethan stood over the body and put a finishing shot into its head. Green matter gushed out, emitting a rank chemical- fertilizer stink.

  Then he looked around the cellar, realizing what it was the sim had done: incredibly, it had shot Winston Bayliss.

  The creature that called itself Winston Bayliss was still strapped to the chair where Ethan had left it, held in place by coils of duct tape, but its upper body slumped at a nasty angle: the invading sim's rifle fire had nearly bisected it at the hip. Bayliss was leaking blood and green liquid at a furious rate.

  It raised its head and looked at Ethan steadily. "Please," it said faintly. "Please, will you bandage the wound? We still need to talk."

  Ethan could only stare.

  "As quickly as possible," Winston Bayliss said. "Please."

  The idea of staying here even an hour longer had become absurd. It was past time to leave, and everything would have to be burned. His notes, his video gear, the attic arsenal— the farm house from its foundation to the peak of its mossy roof. Ethan had been preparing for this contingency since his first days here. He had stored a dozen canisters of kerosene in the main floor closet, and every morning he put a fresh book of matches in his hip pocket.

  He came up the stairs to the attic and found Nerissa waiting, her pistol aimed at his chest. She lowered the weapon instantly, to Ethan's relief. The way her hands were shaking, one awkward twitch might have killed him. "Is it dead?" she asked.

  He managed to nod. Though for all he knew there might be more on the way.

  She relaxed so suddenly that he thought she might lose her footing. She put a hand on a shelf to steady herself.

  All this must have been unimaginably hard on her. Ethan had loved this woman once and maybe still did, though the gap of doubt and blame between them had grown vast and was probably unbridgeable. He couldn't look at her without seeing the Nerissa he had once known: Nerissa across a table in the faculty cafeteria, quoting writers he hadn't read and whose names he barely recognized, her long hair threatening to interfere with a plate of French fries— her liveliness and her ready smile, then so available, now so completely erased. She looked unspeakably tired. Night was falling and he wished he had a comfortable bed to offer her, but there was much to be done and no time to hesitate. Miles to go, in the words of one of those poems she had liked to recite. Miles to go before we sleep.

  He took the first of his dozen jerricans of kerosene into the cellar, where he poured the contents over the corpse of the dead sim and along the floorboards. Nerissa emptied another canister over the firewood stacked under the single window, which he had boarded over, and as she worked Winston Bayliss began to plead with her. "Bind my wounds," it said. "Take me with you."

  The sim had bled out massively from its human parts, and now it was leaking its greener contents onto the cellar floor. A reeking mess, Ethan thought. But the fire would cleanse all that.

  "He's practically cut in half," Nerissa said. "The one who broke in did that?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know."

  "What this thing said, about there being two kinds of sims, do you think that's possible?"

  "I don't know. Half of what these things do is theater."

  "I can explain," Winston Bayliss said. "If you bind my wounds. If you take me with you."

  "Maybe we should," Nerissa said.

  Startled, Ethan looked up from the trail of kerosene he had laid. "Are you serious?"

  "I mean if it knows something about Cassie and Thomas."

  "Cut off my legs," Winston Bayliss said. "They're useless. Tourniquets above the stumps will keep me alive for a time, if you do it quickly."

  Madness, Ethan thought. But Nerissa turned to him and asked in a voice gone steely and indifferent, a voice he barely recognized, "What about it, Ethan? Do you have an axe down here? A hatchet?"

  "Jesus, Ris!"

  "Because if we burn it we'll never know why those others wanted it dead."

  "What exactly are you suggesting? That we hack off its legs and, what, put it in the trunk of the car?"

  "Well, it would fit," she said. "If we did that."

  He hoped it was a macabre joke. Or maybe the kerosene fumes were getting to her. But no. He had always known when she was serious. "Ris . . . even if what you're suggesting might be useful, and I'm not admitting such a thing even for a second, we'd be taking a crazy risk. We don't know for sure what's looking out through that thing's eyes, but what ever it is, I don't want it watching us."

  "That needn't be a problem," the sim said.

  Ethan and Nerissa looked at it. The wounded sim had worked its right hand loose from its bonds— the flow of blood had slicked and softened the coils of duct tape. It raised its free hand to its face (its slightly pudgy face, now pale and unearthly in its bloodlessness), curled the thumb into a hook and thrust it into the socket of first one and then the other of its eyes.

  Once the burning began they couldn't linger. In the dark, the fire would be visible for miles.

  Everything Ethan had wanted to keep— fake ID, a supply of cash and traveler's checks, a fresh pistol— he had packed into a single cardboard filing box, which he slid it into the backseat of Nerissa's car. His own car, the secondhand Chrysler he drove into town on weekends, was parked in an outbuilding separate from the house. But it would be smarter to take Nerissa's car: no one had seen it here and there was nothing to associate it with Ethan or his farm house. He doused the wooden walls of the outbuilding with kerosene and tossed a match behind him. The tindery structure began to burn hastily, and by that time the farm house was already well along, flames creeping up from the foundation and licking out of the first- floor windows. Ethan hurried to the car: he wanted to be gone before the ammunition in the attic began to cook off.

  He offered to drive and Nerissa nodded gratefully. She buckled herself into the passenger seat and allowed her head to slump
against the head rest. Her breathing deepened into gentle snores as he drove away from the farm house. The fitful light of the fire reflected from the windshield, the dashboard, her face. Asleep, she looked exactly like the woman he remembered, but bent, Ethan thought, almost to the point of breaking: bent to the limit of her endurance.

  He pulled over where the laneway met the county road. Nerissa opened her eyes and mumbled a word that might have been, "What?"

  "Shh," he said, reaching through the driver's-side window. "Just picking up the mail."

  One last time. He lifted the hinged door of the rural delivery box, withdrew a single letter and switched on the car's overhead light long enough to glance at it. The return address was illegible and probably meant to be, but he recognized the handwriting at once. The letter was from Werner Beck.