Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  "Nor from his father. But he's had it all his life. That's why I can't picture him volunteering for a physical. Even when he was younger, back when he was in school. . . . but I don't imagine you want to hear these stories."

  "I don't mind," Nerissa said. "Frankly, it's nice to get out of the cold and chat a little. Just don't tell my supervisor." She chuckled, and Mrs. Bayliss laughed agreeably. "Every once in a while we pull a name from the wrong list and end up calling on someone who's already declined our offer. Probably Winston is one of those. I'll have a word with my boss about it. It doesn't do us any good to bother people who aren't interested in what we have to sell. Though I have to say, it's an attractive policy package at the price."

  "I'm sure it is."

  The ease with which Nerissa told these lies surprised Ethan. He guessed it was a skill she had taught herself since 2007, the way he had taught himself marksmanship.

  "Fear of doctors," she said, "is more common than you might think."

  "Winston must have been born with it. Fortunately he was a healthy child. Maybe a little too cautious. He always disliked sports, or anything rough- and- tumble. But he seldom caught cold and never came down with anything more serious, even though he wouldn't submit to vaccinations. The one time he did hurt himself— well, that was probably harder on me and Carl than it was on him."

  "How so?"

  "He was walking home from school one day when a car clipped him. Winston was ten years old, and the car driver— we never did find out who it was, but I suspect it was one of those high- school boys— Adlai Stevenson High is just four streets away and I've seen how they drive, boys with their first license in their pocket— anyhow, Winston wasn't badly hurt, but he was skinned up pretty good and he broke a bone in his arm."

  "So he must have seen a doctor."

  "Well, no— not that we didn't try to take him! I can't even say for sure the bone was broken— I'm no expert— but he couldn't use the arm right and there was a lump up above the elbow and real serious bruising, his whole arm was practically green with it. So I called the doctor and he said to bring Winston in, but while Carl was warming up the car— and this was in the dead of winter— Winston tore out the back door and ran off."

  "Ran off?"

  "Disappeared for, believe it or not, three days. We had the whole town looking for him. It made the news. Lost boy, probably injured, out in the cold. Honestly, Carl and I were prepared for the worst."

  "But they found him?"

  "In fact they didn't. Winston came home all by himself. Walked in the door five days later as if nothing had happened. Of course, all hell broke loose. He said he'd been hiding in an old barn on one of the rural routes and that he kept warm by building a fire at night. And when we asked him why he'd done all this— and believe me, we asked him that question more often than he cared to hear it— he said it was because he didn't want to go to the doctor."

  "Even with a broken arm!"

  "Well . . . we sure thought it had been broken. But it was healed by the time he got back. So he must have just sprained it. And although it probably would have been wise to get him checked out anyhow, we didn't insist. Does that sound foolish?" She shook her head. "Carl and I only had the one child and we probably indulged him more than we should have. Some days I think that's why Winston never married. We coddled him into a lonely bachelorhood. But as my husband used to say, all you can do is the best you can do. There are no guarantees in this life. Not even"— Mrs. Bayliss smiled at her joke—"if you take out insurance."

  The conversation drifted from Mrs. Bayliss's son Winston to the weather lately, and Nerissa checked her watch and said they had another appointment to keep. Mrs. Bayliss saw them to the door (a little abashed, Ethan guessed, at how garrulous she had been) and wished them well. "I'll let Winston know you stopped by."

  "Thank you."

  "You want to leave a card or anything?"

  "It doesn't sound like your son is a likely prospect for us. When do you expect him back?"

  "He said he'd let me know. He hasn't phoned in a few days. That's not like him. But he's probably just having a good time down there in Florida. Last time I saw him he was cheerful as a chipmunk."

  And the last time I saw him, Ethan couldn't help thinking, he was lying in a bed of fallen leaves, eyeless, dying.

  Nerissa was somber in the car, and Ethan respected her silence as he drove back onto the turnpike. The sun beat through the windshield with a clarifying light.

  Eventually she said, "So Mrs. Bayliss isn't a sim."

  "Her knee, you mean."

  "Surgery or even an X-ray would have exposed her. And she wasn't faking it. You saw the scar?"

  He hadn't, but Nerissa said she caught a glimpse when Mrs. Bayliss first sat down, the cotton skirt briefly rucking up to expose a line of suture marks stark as railroad tracks. "Obviously she's not afraid of doctors."

  "But Winston was."

  The nature and origin of the simulacra had been debated by the survivors since 2007. Most assumed the sims were manufactured in their final adult form. But that had never been more than an assumption. Apparently a baseless one. "So what he told us was true," Ethan said. "He was born to a human mother."

  "I guess so. But it's a horrifying idea. That she actually gave birth to this thing, nurtured it, dressed it, sent it to school, and never noticed anything unusual beyond its reluctance to visit a doctor. . . ." Nerissa shuddered. "That's incredibly fucking creepy."

  "But it's possible," Ethan said. "The sims aren't just approximate copies of human beings. In every detail except their internal structure, they're perfect copies. It's tempting to think that if you knew a sim intimately enough something would give it away, some subtlety it hadn't quite mastered. But that's wrong. Even Mrs. Bayliss couldn't guess."

  "I suppose I thought the sims were made for a purpose— to be assassins— and after they did their jobs maybe they just, I don't know, dried up and blew away in the wind. But if what she said is true, it means they can pass for years without being noticed. Anyone could be one."

  "Not you."

  She gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean?"

  "It's been a while," Ethan said. "But the appendectomy scar."

  She surprised him by blushing. "Yes, okay. True. And you had chest X-rays the winter you came down with pneumonia. So we can trust each other."

  "It's the rest of the world we can't be sure about."

  "Also, if Mrs. Bayliss is human and gave birth to a sim— how's that work? Was her husband a sim, too? But that only pushes the question back a generation."

  "It's not uncommon for one species to exploit the nurturing functioning of another species. It's called brood parasitism." In fact it was the same kind of parasitism Bayliss had claimed was happening within the hypercolony itself.

  "But what's the mechanism exactly? How does a perfectly ordinary woman in a perfectly ordinary town give birth to a non- human child?"

  Ethan had no answer.

  "And if they're so perfectly human, we can't even be sure about the Correspondence Society. You guys were always careful about using the U.S. Mail so the hypercolony couldn't listen in, but what if you had a ringer among you? What if a sim was reading your monographs all along?"

  He had thought about this. "There's no way to rule out the possibility. It might be true. Even though we were in hiding, the sims had no trouble finding Cassie and Thomas. Or me. And Bayliss seemed to know exactly how much we knew about the hypercolony. So it would probably be smart to assume that the Society has been infiltrated."

  "So who can we trust? You, me—"

  "That's two. And probably Werner Beck."

  "Beck!" Nerissa said scornfully. "I never did trust Beck."

  15

  DOWD'S GARAGE

  ONE PART OF EUGENE DOWD'S CONVERTED barn had been set aside for paintwork, and Cassie watched with fascination as he worked on the stolen car. Even more fascinating— in a much scarier way— was Dowd's running monologue.

/>   First he unbolted the car's license plates and set them aside on his workbench. The plates were evidence, he said, and he would cut them apart with tin snips and bury the pieces in the yard before they left. Then he snapped off the Ford's removable trim and moldings and used a power sander to rough up the paint. "Ordinarily," he said, "I'd sand down to metal, but we're in a little bit of a hurry here." Cassie guessed this wasn't the first vehicle he'd repainted, probably not the first stolen vehicle he'd repainted.

  When Dowd bent to sand the side panels she could see the blades of his hips working under the denim sprawl of his jeans. Paint dust roiled up around him, but he wasn't wearing a mask and didn't appear to care. When he spoke (between bouts with the noisy sander) he kept his eyes on the Ford, as if Cassie and Thomas and Leo and Beth weren't fully present, as if his words were addressed not to them but to something invisible that lived in the motor of the car. I was in a little town outside of Amarillo, name of it doesn't matter, when Werner Beck found me. This was, let's see, five going on six years ago now.

  The town was where I grew up but I'd been gone a long time and I came back because I didn't know where else to go. I'd been doing odd jobs, carpentry and electrical work mostly, out of the country, but I was done with that, for reasons I'll get to shortly.

  So there I was, back in town and out of work. Since I left both my parents had died, but I didn't know that till I got back. I wasn't real good about keeping in touch. So the news was kind of a shock. Not that they were much of a family. My daddy drank when he wasn't digging foundations and my mom worked as a beautician all her adult life. Cancer took her, and sometime later my daddy shot himself. Their house was sold off for back taxes. I came home to nothing, in other words. All I wanted was to curl up in a safe place and forget what I'd seen down in the Atacama, and all I got was more fuckin' grief.

  I rented me a little place at the edge of town and I guess I meant to sit there smoking weed and watching shit on TV until my savings ran out, but one day Werner Beck knocked on the door. At the time, I didn't know who the fuck he was. I figured he wanted to collect a debt or sell me a Bible. But what he said was, Are you the Eugene Dowd who saw some unusual things in Chile last year? Which made we want to reach for a gun, except I didn't have one. Relax, he tells me, I'm red- blooded all the way through. And I knew what that meant. So I told him to come in.

  Naturally I wanted to know how he'd found me. He said he seen a piece in the local paper. He subscribed to what he called a clipping service. Clipping service sends him pieces from newspapers all over the country, big and little newspapers, if the article mentions certain words or phrases.

  He didn't say what those words or phrases were. But I knew the piece he was talking about. A column in the local rag, which is barely a real newspaper, mostly grocery coupons and classified ads. Well, some bored fucker wrote a column about what he called "colorful characters," and I'd had the misfortune to run into this guy at a bar when I was too pissed for my own good— I told him a few things about the Atacama and he wrote it up like it was some big fucking joke. Local loser sees green men, that kind of shit.

  Yeah, I told Beck, that's my story, or part of it, but the paper didn't use my name, so again, how'd you find me? I asked around, Beck says. Lot of trouble to go to, I say. Yeah, he says, but the thing is, Mr. Dowd, I believe you.

  Well, there really wasn't much in that newspaper column to believe, it seemed to me. The column told how I'd said there were Martians living in South America, which I didn't. It even had a punch line. Like this: "I asked my newfound acquaintance whether his Martians were green, as in the comic books. 'Yes,' he confided, 'green as grass— but only on the inside!' "

  Fucking humiliating.

  Beck saw the expression on my face and said, Look, Mr. Dowd, I'm serious about this. I know all about people who are green on the inside. And one thing I know is, they don't think twice about committing murder. They killed a bunch of my friends. They tried to kill me.

  Which made me realize he was serious. I said, How do I know you're not one of them?

  He told me that was a smart question and he loosened his belt and lifted up his shirt and showed me a scar where he had his appendix out. I asked him what that was supposed to prove. He said the hospital where he was treated would've noticed if he'd been bleeding green. Then he says, How about you?

  I didn't feel like showing him any scars, but he said that was okay, he'd take me at my word. At least for now. The word he used was "provisionally."

  Then we got down to business. Given what he'd already said, I asked him what he wanted. I want to hear your story, he says. And then I'll tell you mine.

  Once he had sanded the original paint Dowd washed the car with soapy water, dried it, and rinsed it again with a solution of mineral spirits. Then he taped off the parts he wanted to protect— windows, bumpers, trim. In the occasional silences, when Dowd wasn't talking or operating power tools, Cassie heard wind rattling the corners and hollows of Dowd's garage. Winter coming. She wasn't sure what winter meant in this part of the country— probably not what it meant in Buffalo, where snow sometimes shut down the city for days.

  Dowd broke for lunch as soon as the car was prepped for spraying. Lunch today was a rerun of lunch yesterday: convenience- store sandwiches. Cassie watched Dowd as he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, crumbs collecting in his moustache. He caught her looking and gave her a grin that wasn't entirely friendly. Werner Beck trusts this man, Cassie reminded herself. But how much did she really know about Leo's father?

  "Had enough to eat?" Dowd asked, still gazing at Cassie.

  She nodded.

  Leo said, "You were going to tell us what you told my father."

  "Yeah." Dowd wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. "I guess I was."

  I was sick of Texas and I wanted to travel, which is how I ended up on the Trans-American Highway— parts of it brand new in those days, all those tunnels and bridges through the Darien Gap— working my way south from the Canal Zone picking up odd jobs. Mostly construction and electrical, like I said. Or what ever came to hand. I slept rough from time to time but I was young and that was all right with me as long as I could move on when I felt like it. Just heading south, like some kind of migrating bird.

  I was in Antofagasta, that's in Chile, when I hooked up with a Dutch company that was doing some work out in the Atacama desert. Building and running a supply depot for a copper mine, supposedly. Crew was mostly local but the company had an arrangement with the unions that let them hire a few foreigners, a handful of Ecuadorian and Colombian guest workers and one American, me— the crew boss liked that I had a U.S. electrician's certificate, which is pretty much the gold standard. So they bused us over the Coast Range and up the Antofagasta Road, then along one of those old roads that used to service nitrate mines, to a flat place where a little spur of the Ferrocarril ran out— the real high desert, dry as glass and air so thin you could see the moon by daylight.

  In a couple of months we had four air- conditioned buildings up and running. More like ware houses than anything else. And it was all kind of a mystery. There was no copper mine in sight, far as I could see. The Dutch crew boss spoke Spanish and a little German but he liked to practice his English on me in the off- hours, so I asked him about that one time. Get a little Jenever into him and he was pretty friendly. But he didn't have much to say. He'd been told the site was a depot to store supplies on their way from the railhead or the road to the mine— the mine itself being a ways east. And no, he said, you couldn't see the mine from here, but some nights you could see a light, like a spotlight or what do you call it, one of those lights they shine at movie theaters, know what I'm talking about? A shaft of light going up into the desert air. What kind of mine has a light like that, I asked him. But he didn't know. It wasn't his business to know.

  We, I mean the work crew, slept in temporary shelters, plywood bunkhouses with canvas roofs and the wind for ventilation. Some nights when I couldn't sleep I went ou
t to look for that light the crew boss talked about. I saw it once, a shaft of light coming up from the horizon, almost too faint to see. Straight- up vertical. It lasted about three minutes. Not real impressive, but it had no business being there.

  Anyway, I stayed on after the construction was finished. The Dutch company'd been contracted to operate the depot once they'd built it, and they needed hands for cartage and security. And I didn't have anything better to do and actually, strange as it sounds, I kind of liked it out there in the high desert. At least at first. It felt like time went slower there. Cities sort of rush you along, if you know what I mean. Whereas in the desert an hour goes by and nothing happens but maybe the wind blows a few grains of sand across the salares. The salt basins.

  I made friends with a guy named Bastián. Bastián was a forklift driver from the south of the country, spoke English, claimed to have a grandmother who spoke Quechua, which meant fuck- all to me. Skinny little guy but strong for his size. Dark- haired. He had a sense of humor, which I appreciated. When I told him about the light on the horizon he grinned and said, Shit, Eugene, that's the alicanto.