Burning Paradise

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She was approaching an unmarked archway and a descending ramp when she saw something move in the sweep of her headlights. Cassie stood on the brakes. The suspension bottomed out and the rear of the vehicle skidded to starboard. She stared ahead. The distant motion became a comprehensible shape, a shadow puppet flailing its arms; it came still closer and turned into a human silhouette. A sim . . . but no. Not a sim.

  She recognized him from the photo she stared at every time she read The Fisherman and the Spider. It was her uncle Ethan.

  He didn't seem surprised to see her and she was too dazed to be startled by his presence. She opened the passenger- side door and he climbed into the van. If the stink of blood and green matter offended him, he didn't show it. She wanted to hug him but her clothes were sticky with blood. In her relief and astonishment Cassie began stammering out the story of the attack in Antofagasta.

  She expected her uncle to interrupt her, to ask questions or offer an explanation of his own. He did neither, and the look on his face finally frightened her into silence. That owl- eyed emptiness: was it pity or dread or something worse? It occurred to her to wonder what had happened to him down in the undercity of the simulacra.

  He seemed to be struggling to speak. "Cassie," he said at last. "How did you get here?"

  All she could say was, "Leo brought me." She held up the palm of one bloody hand, as if that were an explanation.

  "You know what this place is?"

  "Yes!"

  "What do you want to do here?"

  "I want to burn it down! Isn't that what you want?"

  Strangely, he was a long time answering.

  "Everything has a price," he said.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "What we do here doesn't end here. What we destroy here isn't all we destroy."

  Was this even addressed to her? Her joy at finding him began to shrivel into something like dread. She took her left hand from the wheel and put it on the handle of the knife, still slick with Leo's blood. Could she be sure her uncle Ethan was even a human being? "I have this truck full of dynamite and Leo said it was important to use it the right way— he told me the places I should put it but I don't really remember— it's hard to remember— and I don't know if he was telling the truth—"

  "I can show you the places. Where the fuel is, where they generate power, where they grow what they grow. We can burn it all. All of it that matters."

  "Will you really help me?"

  He looked past the blood- spattered window of the van as if at something far away. "We'll help each other."

  31

  ANTOFAGASTA

  NERISSA FORCED THOMAS UP THE STAIRS of the safe house. She held tight to him as he tried to pull away from her and join the fighting below, either to protect his sister or to prove he wasn't afraid— endangering himself, in either case; but she was strong enough to clasp him in her arms and wrestle him to the second- story landing. She turned back just once, at the sound of a gunshot, in time to see Beth Vance tumble onto the risers with blood gushing from her open skull. She hoped Thomas hadn't seen that, but maybe he had: he was suddenly more tractable as she pushed him into a bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

  There was a bathroom attached the bedroom and she huddled there with Thomas, listening to the noise of the invasion. What ever heroic instinct had possessed Thomas, it abandoned him now. He crawled into the narrow space between the toilet and the tub and sat there, hugging his knees. Nerissa pressed her body against the door, sickly aware that their hiding place was no hiding place at all, that it was a cul-de-sac and would become a coffin if the sims succeeded in storming the house.

  But the gunfire reached a crescendo and stopped. She looked at her watch. She tried to steady her breathing. She told Thomas to keep as quiet as he could, quiet as a mouse. She watched the minute hand circle the dial. Five minutes passed and there was nothing to hear but the creaking of beams and rafters as the afternoon heat subsided. Seven minutes. Ten. She detected the keening of distant police sirens.

  She risked opening the bathroom door. Daylight was waning and the bedroom had filled with shadows. "Stay here," she told Thomas, but he followed her into the hall.

  There was no sound from downstairs. She took the enormous risk of calling out Cassie's name. Had there been any answer— even the weakest response— she would have braved the gore- splattered stairs. But no answer came. If Cassie had survived she must already have fled. Fleeing was the only sane thing to do. The sound of the police sirens had grown noticeably louder.

  The front of the house had been breached and the gunfire would surely have attracted a crowd in the street; it would be impossible to leave by the front door. A French door in the bedroom opened onto a tiny balcony overlooking the alley, and Nerissa put her head out to reconnoiter. It would be a long drop to the pavement . . . but if she climbed over the wrought- iron railing and dangled by her hands it might not be so bad. And then she could help Thomas down.

  She explained the plan to Thomas. His face was as pale as parchment and he looked dazed, but he nodded as if he understood.

  She made sure she had her wallet, which contained identification both real and fake and a stash of U.S. dollars and Chilean pesos. The alleyway was empty but probably wouldn't be for long. She clambered over the railing and dangled from the ornamental iron pickets. When she dropped to the pavement she turned her ankle. Pain spiked from her calf to her hip, but she forced herself to stand. "Now you," she called to Thomas.

  He peered down from the balcony, his face a contortion of doubt and dread.

  "I'll catch you if you fall. You trust me?"

  The boy nodded.

  "All right, then. Come on— we have to hurry."

  He dropped into her arms; her ankle turned again; they sprawled on the grimy pavement but were safe.

  "Take my hand," she said, standing.

  Thomas put his feverishly hot hand in hers. As she hobbled away, a busboy from the restaurant three doors south stepped into the alley and called after her: "¿Estás bien? ¿Necesita ayuda?"

  "Estamos bien," she shouted back, "gracias," and turned a corner.

  They boarded a city bus into Antofagasta's business district and got out when Nerissa spotted a Holiday Inn that looked like it catered to Americans. Her scuffed hands and torn jeans drew sidelong looks from the lobby staff as she checked in, but cash on the countertop forestalled any awkward questions.

  In their room she washed Thomas's face— he looked at her impassively around the daubing of the washcloth— and encouraged him to lie down. He stretched out on the bed without complaint or comment.

  She switched on the television, lowered the volume and pulled a chair close to the set. As much as she distrusted TV and radio, they were the only accessible source of news. The local TVN station opened its evening broadcast with an account of the attack, pitched as a multiple murder, possibly drug- related. Police were being cagey about the number of deaths, no doubt because of the problematic nature of the corpses the sims had left behind. There had been, the newscast said, "three confirmed deaths, two males and one female." If the female was Beth Vance, the two males were probably Eugene Dowd and either Leo or Werner Beck.

  Which meant Cassie had escaped. At least, that was a hope to which Nerissa could cling. Though even if it was true, she might never see Cassie again. Cassie might try to make her way back to the States, perhaps to the survivor circle in Buffalo, but possibly not. And it might be better if she didn't.

  She left the chair to feed Thomas and herself on what she could find in the bar fridge (chocolate, crackers, orange juice), to console him with soft words and finally to tuck him under the covers. Then back to the television, on the chance that it might yield new information. None was forthcoming. After midnight the newscast gave way to a dubbed Hollywood movie, decades old.

  Nerissa's thoughts began to fracture and veer strangely. She was exhausted, but this was more than fatigue, more even than despair: it felt like an expanding
emptiness at the center of herself. She told herself she ought to go to bed, but standing up seemed like too much trouble. Instead she slouched more deeply into the chair and let her eyes drift shut. The sound of dubbed voices speaking hurried and awkward Spanish faded into noise. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is as shallow as time. Who had said that? Samuel Johnson, she thought. Or no, Thomas Carlyle. She couldn't remember.

  32

  THE ATACAMA

  CASSIE STOOD BACK AS HER UNCLE inspected the contents of the van. She tried not to think about the sims lying all around her, unconscious but drawing breath. The launch tower loomed above her like a night- blooming flower. A cold wind guttered through the compound, stirring up miniature whirlwinds in the dusty streets. She shivered.

  Ethan pulled Werner Beck's radio- interference device— a useless piece of wishful thinking, he called it— out of the truck and set it aside. Over his shoulder Cassie saw stacked blocks of what looked like lead-ingots in red waxed paper. "Enough to do damage," he said. "But we only have three sets of timers and batteries."

  "Is that bad?"

  "We can plant charges in the breeding rooms, the generator rooms, and under the launch mechanism."

  "Will that be enough?"

  "I hope so."

  He got in the van— behind the wheel, ignoring the mess of blood and green matter there— and beckoned her after. No, Cassie thought. Crawl back into the stinking space where the Leo- thing had bled out? Impossible. But her feet carried her there. Some dumb instinct that could not possibly be courage forced her inside. She resisted the urge to cover her ears as Uncle Ethan started the motor. She was careful not to look back as the night sky disappeared behind her.

  What Uncle Ethan called "the breeding room" was at the end of a long down- sloping ramp in a maze of such ramps and corridors. In several places the passage was blocked by stationary vehicles or mounded bodies. Her uncle became adept at putting these vehicles into gear and rolling them out of the way; twice, she helped by dragging aside the inert bodies of sims. Human sims mostly, but the other kind, too. The strange ones. The fur on their limbs was dense and moist, and they had a chemical smell, like turpentine. The ones with small six- fingered hands were unpleasant to look at; the ones with claws like box cutters were worse.

  The breeding room when they reached it looked to Cassie like an oversized, cruelly impersonal hospital ward. There were long rows of beds, many still occupied by the bodies of obviously pregnant female sims, alongside ranks of what were probably mechanized incubators. The glass walls of the incubators were glazed with moisture, but Cassie could make out distorted images of the infants inside. Some apparently human, some not. All breathing. Worse, all breathing in unison.

  Uncle Ethan mounded up roughly a third of the incendiary blocks next to the bank of incubators. He crimped and inserted blasting caps and ran wires back to the igniter, but hesitated over the timer.

  "The timer's jury- rigged to the electric initiator," Cassie said. "The Leo- thing told me how to work it."

  Uncle Ethan gave her a sharp look. "Leo told you that?"

  "He said this is what he wanted. He said he wanted to die. I mean it wanted to die. The hypercolony. Or what ever was left of it—his part of it."

  She repeated what little she remembered of what Leo had told her to memorize about the explosives in the truck. "He said he wanted us to destroy this place because it's been taken over by a kind of parasite. Is that true?"

  "It might be."

  "But that means Leo— the Leo- thing—was part of the original hypercolony."

  "Yes."

  "He's what killed my parents."

  "Yes."

  "But we're doing what he wants."

  "For our own reasons, Cassie."

  "He's using us, the way the hypercolony has always used us."

  Uncle Ethan torqued a wire into a binding post. "It doesn't matter. If we kill them, we kill all of them. Both kinds." He showed her the timer, which looked like it had been cobbled together from hardware- store parts. "One hour," he said. "Make a note of the time and keep an eye on your watch. I'll keep an eye on mine."

  If we have an hour.

  They got back in the van.

  The generator rooms were even deeper in the complex, where the air was hot and had an metallic tang the roaring ventilators couldn't carry away. The central chamber was an inverted bowl the size of a football stadium, insulated with foamed concrete and crowded with a bewildering assembly of equipment racks, conduits, electrical generators and hydraulic pumps. Uncle Ethan began to make a stack of incendiary bricks next to an enormous white tank on which the word PROPANO was printed in orange letters. He worked methodically, almost robotically, and Cassie helped by handing down slabs of explosives from the van. She tried not to think about the weight of the earth over her head or the way each minute slipped away like something precious, lost. She wondered what would happen after the detonation. Would all the sims in the world drop dead? How many families would discover that a son or sister or mother or grandfather had been something inhuman— that they had given their love to a disgusting lie?

  Uncle Ethan struggled with the initiator. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the dusty concrete floor. Finally the timer light sprang on. He looked at his watch and asked Cassie to look at hers. They agreed that twenty- eight minutes had passed since they left the nursery. He set the timer for thirty- two minutes.

  They headed upgrade, and this time there were no vehicles or sims to push out of the way. It was good that Uncle Ethan had known how to find the vulnerable parts of the installation. But that raised another question. One she was almost afraid to ask. "How did you get here?"

  He kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. "What?"

  "Before you found me. Before I came. How did you get here? What were you doing?"

  "They caught me on the road and took me prisoner."

  "Why didn't they just kill you?"

  "They said they wanted my help."

  "What, to protect them?"

  "They wanted me not to do what we're doing now."

  "And they thought you'd agree to that?"

  "I guess they thought there was a chance."

  "Why? Did they threaten you? Did they promise you something?"

  Uncle Ethan wouldn't answer. He just drove. And here was the night sky again. The steel and glass flower of the launch mechanism, the crater- rim of industrial waste, the unconscious sims, the scouring wind.

  Uncle Ethan parked at the base of the launch tower, under the overhang of the huge mirrored petals. The last of the explosive bricks were in the back of the van. "Do we put them inside?" The tower at ground level appeared seamlessly solid. "There's no door."

  "And no time."

  Cassie held her wrist up to the roof light of the van and read her watch. He was right. Ten minutes until the underground charges were due to detonate, not long enough to finish rigging the third timer and get clear. "So what do we do?"

  "Take a clean vehicle and get out of here."

  They left the van. One of the ubiquitous white pickup trucks was parked a few yards away. Uncle Ethan pulled the limp body of a sim from behind the wheel and started the engine.

  Cassie climbed into the passenger seat and waited while Uncle Ethan returned to the van and unscrewed the gas cap. He took off his shirt, twisted one arm of it and used it to wick up a little gasoline. Then he opened the hood and wadded the shirt into the engine compartment. She understood that he meant to set fire to the van: there would be no need for a detonator when the flames reached the dynamite. But he hesitated.

  No match, Cassie thought. No cigarette lighter. Uncle Ethan didn't smoke. Eugene Dowd would have had a lighter. But Eugene Dowd had been shot to death back in Antofagasta.

  Her uncle tugged loose an ignition wire and sparked it next to the gas- soaked cloth— once, twice, until a high yellow flame popped out of the darkness. He stumbled back, coughing.

  Cassie looked at her watch as he climbed back behind
the wheel. Less than five minutes now. But enough. Uncle Ethan put the truck in gear and drove. They had covered maybe half the ground between the launch tower and the mound wall when the sims began to stand up.

  Simultaneously, as if they were following some kind of choreography, a nightmarish ballet, the sims rose to their feet and began to run toward the launch tower. Uncle Ethan swerved to avoid a knot of them. The truck fishtailed and stalled; he cursed and began to work the key in the ignition. One of the six-limbed sims vaulted over the pickup, rocking the vehicle on its suspension as it rebounded from the truck bed. We'll be killed, Cassie thought.