Burning Paradise

“He was following us. He admitted it.”

“I know! He needs help.”

“We could… maybe we could call from somewhere down the road.”

And get away cleanly, he meant. Yes, but: “There’s no time. Look at him, Leo!”

“There’s nothing we can do for him.”

“Of course not! He needs a doctor!” Then she understood: “You want to drive away and leave him here?”

“I don’t want to do it. I don’t think we have a choice.”

“No! We shot him and we have to help him! Now! Now! Right away!”

“Cassie, listen to me… what about Thomas?”

She looked around guiltily. Her brother was standing back by the car. Not close enough to see the man’s injury in any detail, but close enough that he must have witnessed the shooting. (The killing, she corrected herself: that’s what it would be if they abandoned the man here.) But yes, it was true, if the police came, if they were arrested, who would look after Thomas? How could she protect him?

The man on the ground took a gurgling breath and fell silent. His hands ceased moving and his eyes looked at blankly at the sky. Cassie registered the sudden slackness of his body. Her head filled with the sound of the wind in the leafless trees.

“Is he dead?” Beth asked.

Cassie felt for a pulse again, pointlessly. She stood up and backed away.

“We have to hide him,” Leo said. “He’ll be found sooner or later. Better for us if it’s later.”

“Hide him?” Beth asked.

Leo nodded at a place where the plastic safety barrier had been bent to the ground by weather or reckless tourists. “Help me,” he said. “Beth?”

Beth swallowed hard but nodded.

Cassie watched in disbelief as they took the man’s arms and began to drag him toward the slope. The man’s shoes left an irregular trail of blood. Cassie scuffed gravel over the pond of blood where the man had been shot, concealing the evidence. Soon her own shoes were spattered with blood. Were they forgetting something?

“His hat,” she said.

Beth came back for the man’s hat and tossed it toward the distant valley. It sailed on the wind and then dropped out of sight.

“Now roll him down,” Leo said.

“We should go through his pockets first.”

Cassie turned away. She couldn’t bear to watch Leo turning the corpse on its side so Beth could extract the dead man’s wallet. She walked back to the car, to Thomas, trying not to hear the sound (though she could hardly ignore it) of the man’s body tumbling downhill through clumps of wild sumac and brittle brown grass. The noise dwindled and finally stopped. Somewhere in the woods a crow called out.

Later—after dark, the road unwinding under a shimmer of stars—Beth summoned the courage to look at what she had taken from the dead man’s pockets and stuck into her purse: A leather billfold. A couple of hundred dollars in cash. And a prescription bottle of a drug called Bisoprolol. “It’s a heart drug,” Leo said. “He must have had a condition.”

Leo dumped the billfold and the pills (all identifying labels removed) into a trash bin outside a post office in a nameless little town where all the stores were closed for the night. Later, at a twenty-four-hour gas station convenience shop off the Interstate, Beth used some of the dead man’s cash to buy a selection of fresh and dry food, which she secured in the trunk of Leo’s car.

Cassie sat in the backseat with Thomas as they drove on. During the night Thomas asked her whether the man with big glasses was really dead. “Yes,” she told him. No point in lying. Thomas could be protected from many things, but not from this obvious truth.

Since then her brother hadn’t said a word. He sat slumped with his head against Cassie’s shoulder, eyes closed, not asleep but not entirely awake, hiding in his own somnolent body as the car rolled on. He was the only i

8

OF ALL THE NIGHTMARISH EVENTS OF THE last three days, Nerissa thought, this had to be the most grotesquely surreal: descending step by step into the cellar of her ex-husband’s farm house, where something both more and less than human was waiting to be interrogated.

She was physically and emotionally exhausted. Coming home to find Cassie and Thomas missing from the apartment had revived every fear she had so carefully repressed since the slaughter of ’07. During the drive from Buffalo she had been reluctant even to stop for gas, and when she did eventually stop she found herself wondering whether the station attendant (some acned teenager) was one of them. It was the kind of reflexive paranoia that might have protected Thomas and Cassie, had she practiced it consistently. But after seven quiet years she had relaxed her vigilance. A night out, she had thought, was a small thing to ask. A well-earned reward, in fact, after everything she had done (and done without complaint) for her sister’s children. She deserved it, no?

The empty apartment, the packed bag absent from its place under Cassie’s bed, the ransacked kitchen: that was her answer.

But she would find Cassie and Thomas, she promised herself. She would protect them. Bring them home. And to hell with Werner Beck and the Correspondence Society’s rules of conduct. The Correspondence Society was dead. The only thing left was family. The only thing that mattered.

Ethan walked ahead of her down the wooden stairs. He was still talking about the sim, how it couldn’t be trusted, but his words were only an ambient buzz. Nerissa didn’t care. She just wanted to see the monster. To force some kind of truth from its stupid, lying mouth.

Of course she knew Ethan was right: the simulacrum—that is to say, the hypercolony of which it was a part—couldn’t be trusted. It wasn’t a human being. It wasn’t even an animal. Ethan and Werner Beck had proved that.

Ethan had told Nerissa about the Society shortly after they were engaged to be married. He had confessed his membership as if it were an embarrassing truth she needed to know about him, like a minor case of herpes. At first she had thought of the Society as something trivial—Masonry for mathematicians, an academic boys’ club with the pretense of a conspiracy as its binding secret. The ideas he had blushingly put forward seemed hardly credible. The radio-reflective layer (itself only an engineer’s abstraction as far as Nerissa was concerned) as a living thing? Exercising subtle control over human history? Even if she had wanted to believe it, how could she?

She hadn’t taken it at all seriously until he escorted her to his lab and showed her his cell cultures. He had been working with samples recovered from Antarctic ice cores, ostensibly studying airborne pollen deposited by ancient snowfalls. (All Society research needed a legitimizing pretext, he said. Research that cut too close to certain subjects had a way of losing funding or getting derailed during peer review. Careers had been devastated, back in the days before Society members learned to be discreet. But the names he cited were only vaguely familiar to her: who was Alan Turing, for instance?) The pollen was present in the ice cores, and Ethan had dutifully categorized the samples by species, teasing out the implications for the ecology of pollinating insects; his findings had eventually appeared in Ecological Entomology. What he didn’t report were the tiny granules he had also isolated from the ice: microscopic spherules of what appeared to be carbonaceous chondrite, enclosing traces amounts of complex organic matter.

The spherules were few in absolute number and easily overlooked, hardly distinguishable from dust, but consistently present in a thousand years of deposited ice. The Society’s hypothesis was that they had sifted down through the atmosphere from the radio-reflective layer, the radiosphere—that the radiosphere itself was an orbital cloud of trillions of such granules, evenly distributed around the Earth. The cloud was too diffuse to block more than a fraction of incoming sunlight or to detect with the naked eye, but the distributed mass of it, Ethan had calculated, must be immense.