Burning Paradise

“If he’s alive.”

“If he’s alive. After that you can find yourself a job in one of these dumb little towns. If that’s really what you want.” He opened the door to the room and held it for Cassie as she stepped back inside.

They’re not dumb little towns, she thought. If saying so made Leo feel superior to the people who lived in them, so be it. But he was wrong. And at the root of the wrongness was envy.

All those little towns out there in the dark, she thought, and all those cities, too, all the people behind their yellow windows taking for granted the sanity and predictability of things in general. It would be easy and satisfying simply to hate them. But Cassie remembered too well the time when her own life had been like that, when she had been unambiguously proud to stand up on Armistice Day and salute the flags of the United States and the League of Nations and everything they seemed to represent: the century of peace, the inexorable advance of freedom and prosperity. Things she still wanted to believe in.

Thomas sat slumped on the bed, his eyes drifting closed though they were still fixed on the television screen. A news broadcast had come on, a woman in a neat blue suit talking about crop failures in Tanzania. Massive shipments from the International Grain Reserve had arrived at the port of Dar es Salaam. The newscaster’s expression conveyed her sympathy. But that could have been an adjustment performed by the hypercolony, a subtle enhancement, what movie people called a special effect.

Beth came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, water dripping from her hair to her shoulders. “Turn that shit off,” she told Cassie. “And get your brother off the fucking bed. I need some sleep.”

6

ETHAN GRABBED HIS PISTOL—FULLY loaded apart from the round he had already fired into the leg of the creature in the cellar—and hurried to the door. He was in time to see a grimy blue Ford Elektra bumping down the unpaved access road. It pulled up nearly at his doorstep, the rear end fishtailing in a cloud of dust. The driver’s side door flew open and a woman stepped out. A shock of recognition left Ethan blinking.

Nerissa.

Seven years since he had last seen her. Even then, in the months before the murders, they had been living separately, only technically husband and wife. And even now, the sight of her provoked an upwelling of nostalgia and longing that was hard to suppress. He lowered the pistol and stepped onto the porch.

Her taste in clothing hadn’t changed, though she’d obviously dressed in a hurry. She wore blue jeans, a plaid cotton shirt, and a wide orange scarf that dangled to her hips. A pair of glasses—those were new; she used to favor contacts—amplified her already large eyes. She was older now, of course, but apart from a few trivial lines she looked pretty much the way she had when he first met her at a faculty party in Amherst.

She walked steadily toward him as his initial rush of plea sure soured into dread. She came up the steps onto the porch. Then she was inches from him and he had no choice but to take her in his arms.

“Jesus,” he whispered. “Ris, Ris—it’s not safe here!”

She accepted the embrace, then stepped back from it. “I came for a reason, Ethan.”

“You don’t understand. You have to leave. The sooner the better. I’m leaving.”

“Then we’ll leave together. This is about Cassie.”

Not the first time today his niece’s name had come up. He tried to meet her eyes and couldn’t. “You’d better come in,” he said.

Her name had been Nerissa Stewart the day he met her, and by the end of the faculty mixer he realized he had fallen in love—if not with her, exactly, since he hardly knew her, then with her quick curiosity and the way she squinted at him as if he were a puzzle she wanted to solve. She was an English instructor specializing in William Blake, an English poet whose work Ethan had not read since a high-school encounter with Blake’s Tyger, and Ethan’s work in entomology had been equally bewildering to her. Later he would say he could find no truth in poetry and she could discover no poetry in invertebrates. But that was a packaged answer for people who asked about their separation. In fact, during the few years they were together, they had shared more than a few poetic truths.

And in the seven years since the last time he had spoken to her Ethan had rehearsed their reunion countless times. It was a fantasy he found shameful but couldn’t resist, especially when he was locked in by winter snow and helpless before the momentum of his own thoughts. Sometimes these fantasies were erotic: the sex had always been good, a foundation stone in the otherwise flimsy architecture of their marriage, and it was difficult not to replay those scenes when the wind came butting against the walls of the farm house like an angry bull. On easier days he might imagine apologizing to her, forgiving her, being forgiven by her, laughing with her or listening to her laugh. But none of that mattered now. There was urgent business between them. The old business, the inevitable business.

“Cassie’s gone,” she said. “I mean, missing. I can explain, but… do you have coffee? I haven’t had a coffee since yesterday. I drove here without sleep. Could use a bathroom break, too.”

He apologized for the condition of the bathroom, and while she was in it he tried to organize his whirling thoughts. Cassie was missing. Which meant Ethan wasn’t the only one who had received a visit. The terror had started again. That fucking thing in the cellar! He had let it live—that had been a mistake, one he would soon correct. But he needed to talk to Nerissa first: listen to her, offer what advice he could, help her get away safely. And quickly.

She came back to the kitchen table and accepted a cup of lukewarm coffee without looking at it. Before he could assemble his thoughts she said, “I know you weren’t expecting me. I could hardly warn you. I wasn’t even sure you’d still be here. You gave me this address a long time ago. I was afraid you’d moved on. It’s strange for me, too, being here, seeing you. But I came because of Cassie. Let me tell you what happened, what was it, my God, just two days ago. Then we can decide what to do about it.”

“Time is an issue here.”

“Then just let me talk.”

Nerissa told him she had been away from her apartment the night a simulacrum came to Liberty Street. The next morning—arriving home to find the apartment empty and a dire note from Cassie taped to the refrigerator door—she had canvassed the neighbors and reconstructed what had happened. In the early hours of the morning and well before dawn, a man had been killed in a traffic accident directly outside the apartment. The neighbors’ halting “you won’t believe this” descriptions made it clear that the dead man had been a simulacrum.

Cassie, always a light sleeper, must have witnessed the event. And Cassie—like all the children of survivor families—had been trained to react instantly to the appearance of a sim.

“She would have assumed it was coming to kill her. And maybe it was. So she took Thomas and her suitcase and went to the nearest Society contact to warn him. Unfortunately, the nearest contact was Leo Beck.”

“Werner’s son?”

“Leo’s twenty-two years old now, and he’s as much a contrarian as his father. Society people were all the family he ever really had, but I think he hated us as much as he loved us. He was popular with Cassie’s cohort, though. I guess he seemed less, I don’t know, passive than the rest of us.”

Werner Beck, Leo’s father, had taken a similar position. Werner believed the hypercolony might be vulnerable to human attack, that the Correspondence Society’s accumulated knowledge constituted a weapon that could be used against it. And it was an attractive idea, Ethan thought. At least until you began to calculate the potential cost in human lives.