Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The noise reached him belatedly, but it was sudden and shocking, a continuous thunder. The seed vessel appeared to hover for a fraction of a second, then vaulted upward on a pillar of furious light.

  It all happened quickly. The vessel became a spark, an ember, finally vanished as if it had fallen into the bowl of the sky. The beam flickered off.

  Ethan removed the goggles. Dry wind blew through the windowless cart. He shivered.

  "Are you cold?" the sim asked.

  No, he wasn't especially cold. It was only that he had been reminded by this spectacle of who he was talking to: this creature beside him, a human gloss on something ancient, formic, emotionless. . . . He couldn't help looking at the distant berm that enclosed the facility. He would never see the other side of it. He would die here, buried with the discarded skins of monsters.

  He wasn't cold. He was just tired.

  "We'll go below," the simulacrum said, "where it's warmer."

  She drove back into the warren under the beam antenna, into the brightly- lit and perpetually busy corridors and chambers there. She said some more about the consequences of the destruction of the colony, but Ethan hardly heard her. He had made the mistake of thinking about Nerissa.

  "If all electronic communication is disabled, emergency services will be crippled. Urban populations will panic. Communications might be restored using ground- based transmitters and repeaters, but that could take years. There will be many, many unnecessary deaths in the meantime. And you can't blame us for those deaths. We're willing to continue sustaining the peace of the world."

  "Your peace." What had Nerissa called it? The pax formicae.

  "Our peace, your peace, is there a meaningful difference?"

  "Yes."

  "Even at the expense of human lives?"

  For seven years Ethan had considered his marriage a closed book. Cruelly, the last few weeks had given him something to live for. Lost now, of course. Thrown away.

  "And there would be consequences for your family."

  He dropped all pretense of indifference and stared. "What are you saying?"

  "You're about to be offered a choice. I'm asking you not to make it rashly. The wrong decision would have tragic consequences for the people you love."

  "Is that a threat?"

  "You once drew a contrast between the fisherman and the spider. Both feed their offspring, but the fisherman loves his children and the spider does not. I'm not asking you to sympathize with the spider. I'm asking you to make the fisherman's choice."

  The female sim spoke for a few minutes more, calmly and earnestly. Then she closed her eyes. Her body went slack, her legs folded under her and she dropped to the floor.

  Outside Ethan's cell, the corridor was suddenly quiet. The sound of engines and footsteps subsided. Ventilation fans whispered, the fluorescent ceiling tubes hummed. All else was silence.

  30

  THE ATACAMA

  CASSIE FOUGHT HIM, KICKING AT HIS LEGS and flailing at his face, trying to get enough traction to push herself out the door of the van. She managed to bloody his nose— bright red blood from the human shell of him pulsed down Leo's upper lip— but he succeeded in pinning her to the seat, grunting through blood- stained teeth as he straddled her legs.

  He was strong. He pulled shut the passenger- side door and locked it. With one hand he yanked open the glove compartment. Inside, there was a roll of duct tape and a hunting knife in a leather sheath. He used the tape to bind her wrists, then her ankles. Then he pulled the seat belt tight around her and taped the buckle so she couldn't release it even if she managed to get her hands free.

  She screamed and shouted at him as he did this. But it was late and they were deep in the high desert. A tank truck passed in the opposite direction as she struggled— she saw the word COPEC printed in fading orange letters on its side— but it didn't stop or even slow down.

  Once she was secure, Leo got behind the wheel and steered the van onto the road. Cassie stopped screaming and began quietly cursing him. He ignored her, and she tired quickly. Her throat was raw; her mouth was unbearably dry. She twisted her hands against the duct tape, though it felt as if she were peeling the skin off her wrists.

  "Don't," Leo said. "You'll hurt yourself."

  She tried to force herself to think. To imagine some way out of this. To get past the choking humiliation of it, a presence as intense as the reek of green matter. She guessed it was Leo's father who had driven a needle through the lie of Leo's body and into the stinking truth.

  She should have known. This was her own fault. For years she had kept a careful distance from other people, so- called ordinary people, people who had never seen what she had seen, people so authentically innocent they couldn't even dream such things. She knew what was hidden in the world's shadows.

  But in the end she had lowered her guard. She had given herself to Leo. And the thing she had allowed herself to love was a monstrosity: no, literally a monster. She suppressed the almost unbelievably urgent need to hurt him or run from him and forced herself to look at him: at Leo's face, now utterly impassive as he watched the road ahead. If Aunt Ris's theory was correct (and of course it was) this creature had constructed itself in a human womb (I'm not the first woman it violated), making the necessary adjustments so its human shell wouldn't be some parthenogenic duplicate of its host, a chromosome here, a chromosome there . . . the end result: this ostensibly male object, the architecture and the furnishings of its skull, the high cheekbones and acne- scarred skin and gentle eyes concealing a filthy knot of green matter where there should have been a brain, every gesture and word and touch (it TOUCHED me, dear god, I LET IT TOUCH ME) dictated by signals from an invisible hive . . .

  She managed to say, "I need to puke."

  "You need to listen to what I'm going to tell you."

  His voice sounded different now. Colder, flatter. Of course it did. He had dropped his mask. Or exchanged it for a different one. "I NEED TO PUKE!"

  "Puke, then. Puke on the floor between your legs. Do it now, because if you keep making useless noise I'll tape your mouth."

  She puked on the floor, not because he said so but because she couldn't help it. It had been a long time since her last meal. All that came up was a sour brown dribble.

  But it helped clear her thoughts. She felt as if she had floated a little way above her aching body.

  "You know what I am," the Leo- thing said. "You expect I'll lie to you. But I'm not trying to convince you of anything. At this point it doesn't matter what I want."

  Leo had been the hypercolony's eyes and ears inside the Correspondence Society, privy even to Werner Beck's secrets. He could have killed any of them or all of them, any time. Cassie wondered why he hadn't.

  "This van is packed with industrial explosives. Dynamite, the kind they use for blasting in mines. My father's invention—"

  "He's not your father. You never had a father."

  "My father's invention is a useless fantasy, but the dynamite is real. You need to know how to use it. Listen to me. I'm going to tell you what a blasting cap looks like, how to attach it to a stick of dynamite and how to fuse it. I don't have time to tell you twice, so pay attention. You have to remember this."

  "You must be insane," Cassie said.

  But the creature went on talking.

  Cassie was aware of the knife. It kept drawing her eye. It was a big knife, maybe ten inches long, in a leather sheath. The Leo- thing kept it wedged between his left leg and the driver's seat, where she would have a hard time reaching it even if her hands were free.

  The Leo- thing talked about how to crimp a blasting cap and how to ignite a fuse. She wondered what the point of all this could possibly be.

  "But it's not enough," he said, "to ignite some explosives. To do real damage you have to know where to plant them. You have to think about other incendiary material in the environment, the fire that will follow and how it will burn."

  Did these assertions count as lies? Becau
se the simulacra were liars: she had learned that from the Society; it had been implied on every page of her uncle's book. But no, not liars exactly; they were simply indifferent to truth, had no conception of truth. She said, "What do you expect me to blow up?"

  "If you weren't smart you wouldn't be here. I could have taken Beth. But you're smarter and braver than Beth. Where do you think we're going?"

  Her hatred flared up fresh and hot. "Into the fucking desert!"

  "Where exactly?"

  "How should I know?"

  "We're going to the breeding facility."

  The place Eugene Dowd had described. She had not permitted herself that thought. It was too terrifying. She strained against the seat belt, tried to swing her bound and cramping hands toward the door latch.

  "Stop. Calm down. Cassie, think. You know what your aunt said about there being two kinds of sims, two entities competing to control the hypercolony?"

  Deep breaths. She closed her eyes. No point wasting her strength. What was left of it. She nodded.

  "I want to destroy the facility. It doesn't matter why. But I can't do it alone. In fact I can't do it at all. All I can do is give you a chance."

  She waited for him to go on. Lies, but maybe in his lies she could discover something she could use, some means of leveraging an escape.

  "You know what I am," the Leo- thing said. "I'm not just this body. I'm something larger. I'm older than you can imagine, Cassie. I'm weaker than I was, and I'm being eaten from the inside out. It's past time for me to die. I want to die. I want you to help me die. Don't you want that too?"

  His voice sounded like the road under the wheels or the thin air skimming past the windows. It sounded like the white moon rising and the hollow basins of the salares. It sounded like the stars.

  Where the highway met the railhead in a tangle of fenced yards and boxcars, Leo followed a two- lane road that veered away from San Pedro de Atacama and bisected the desert like a surveyor's line. He had started talking about dynamite and blasting caps again. Cassie's attention faded in and out. Words and fragments of words echoed in her head like frantic poetry.

  She forced her eyes open and discovered that time had passed, though the sky was still dark. This endless night. Her hands were numb and tingling. Her body ached. Had she been having a nightmare? No. This was the nightmare.

  She shook her head to clear it. The reek of sim blood had grown so intense that she no longer smelled it so much as felt it, a pressure in the air. The Leo- thing's leg was dark with moisture.

  The paved road gave way to gravel and ahead of them there was a huge moonlit mound, a wall of earth and debris that Cassie recognized with a kind of anesthetized dread as the breeding ground Eugene Dowd had described. Distant figures moved on the rim of it, black silhouettes against the blue- black sky. Some moved on two legs, some on four.

  "Only a few minutes now," the Leo- thing said.

  He unsheathed the knife and leaned toward Cassie. She avoided his eyes and focused on the blade. It was bright and smooth and wickedly sharp. It moved in concert with Leo's arm like the sting in a scorpion's tail.

  With his free hand he clasped her bound wrists. "Do you remember what I told you? Wake up, Cassie, wake up, this is important!"

  She shook her head in incomprehension.

  "I can't hurt them," Leo said. "There's very little left of me. But I can shut them down. I can put them to sleep. And I'll sleep too. Every living thing that operates under the protocols of the hypercolony will stop functioning. For a little while. Only a little while! You'll be alone. So it's up to you. You know what to do, right? Do it. And do it quickly."

  Was this the same Leo who had stroked her hair in a bed in a room on the long road down the spine of the Americas? The same Leo who had kissed her and told her to sleep well? Sleep well, Cassie.

  He put the blade between her legs and sliced the duct tape binding her ankles. She watched the back of his head as he moved, his fine hair matted with sweat and road grime, the vulnerable nape of his neck. She thought about kicking him but couldn't summon the strength.

  On the distant berm, creatures both two- and four- legged began descending toward the motionless van. They moved with grace and deliberation and an eerie speed. When they passed into the moon- shadow of the hill they seemed to disappear altogether.

  Leo drew back and looked at her. "I'm going to cut your hands loose. Hold still."

  She held still. He braced her arms with his body and slit the knot of tape in a single motion. Her hands began to burn as blood flowed back into them. She was still strapped into the seat.

  Leo glanced down the road, where the sims were running toward the van, closing in on it, advancing into the glare of the headlights as if they were riding a wave of light. The six-limbed ones made her think of huge crabs, scissoring the air with their claws.

  Leo turned the knife in his hand and grasped it by the blade. Cassie saw a line of blood well up from the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. He offered her the handle. She stared at it.

  "Take it," he said.

  "What?"

  "Take it! Take it, Cassie! Take it!"

  She grabbed it from him, gripped the hilt with both hands and aimed the blade at him, her heart hammering in her chest.

  "Now cut yourself loose from the seat belt."

  Without taking her eyes off him she felt for the fabric of the belt. She held it away from her hips and sawed at it. It parted, strand by strand, under the pressure of the blade.

  "Remember what I told you," the Leo- thing said.

  As soon as he said it his mouth went slack. His head drooped toward his chest. He slumped against the driver's-side door as she severed the last strands of the seat belt.

  She scooted as far from him as she could get, angling the blade at Leo's inert body. Was this a trick? His eyes were open but they didn't move. He seemed to be staring with rapt attention at the ceiling of the van.

  She spared a glance for the road. A few yards ahead of the van, the approaching sims had also fallen. They lay motionless in the harsh rake of the headlights.

  She turned back to Leo. Was he breathing? She watched his chest. His stained blue work shirt moved in a slow but perceptible rhythm. He was unconscious but still alive.

  It's past time for me to die, he had said.

  She opened the door so she could escape if she needed to. A gust of wind washed over her. She gulped cold air into her lungs.

  She leaned into Leo's unconscious body and stared into his unseeing eyes. Pupils like black pennies. Under the reek of sim blood she could smell the sharp human tang of his sweat. It was the way he had smelled when he hovered over her in bed, his arms braced and his back arched in a perfect tensioned curve. That earthy smell, like garden soil in sunlight.

  She put the knife to his neck where it sloped from his Adam's apple to the V- shape of his collarbone. She could see a faint pulse beating there. The point of the knife pricked his pale skin and one perfect red pearl of blood welled up.

  Sleep well.

  She put both hands on the handle of the knife and leaned forward.

  She pushed Leo's body out of the van and took his place in the driver's seat. The puddle of blood on the vinyl upholstery stained her jeans and added its coppery stink to the redolent air. She put the vehicle in gear and drove slowly forward. She steered around the inert sims on the road. The human ones looked like people who had fainted or fallen asleep. The six-limbed ones— some with sharp claws at the end of their forearms, some with small, delicately- fingered hands— looked like sideshow monstrosities cobbled together from wax and animal fur.

  At the top of the berm— she could see the installation below, the bunkers and smokestacks and the strange steel structure poised at the center of it like a gigantic flower— her courage nearly failed. Even with the explosives in the van, how could she possibly damage something so huge? Leo had told her how to fuse the dynamite and where to put it, but her memory was stuttering and imperfect and s
he distrusted everything he had said. She couldn't go on.

  All she had was momentum, and that was what carried the vehicle downhill into the sim town while she worked the brake sporadically. The grid of roads was linear and precise, every intersection burning with artificial light. Sims were everywhere, lying where they had fallen— not dead, she reminded herself, merely asleep, and not forever. They might wake at any moment. She drove over some of the bodies. They popped like rotten fruit.

  She aimed the van at the metallic flower at the center of the facility. Under it, Leo had said, was an entire underground city: a city she could not imagine herself entering.