Burning Paradise

“I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that. Maybe my father does. But if we weren’t dangerous, they wouldn’t be hunting us.”

“Who—us? One guy, two girls, and a twelve-year-old? Yeah, we’re pretty dangerous, all right. Dangerous to middle-aged men with heart conditions.”

As soon as she said it, she wished she could take it back. She could see from Leo’s pinched expression that she had hurt him.

“That was an accident.”

“No, you’re right, I know…”

“I never meant for it to happen. But even if it is our fault—my fault—he wouldn’t be dead if the sims hadn’t come after us. You think the sims feel guilty about it?”

“They don’t feel anything at all. That’s how we’re different from them.”

“You lost your parents, right?”

“Yes,” Cassie said, and of course Leo knew that; all the survivors of ’07 had heard each other’s horror stories at least once.

“You ever get angry about it?”

“Sure I do.”

“I mean really angry? Angry enough to want to do something about it? Or do you just try not to think about it?”

She shrugged, embarrassed.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Anger, I mean.” Leo stood and crushed his cigarette under the heel of his shoe. A spark escaped into the wind and winked out in the darkness. “You don’t have to be nice all the time. Get angry once in a while. You’re entitled.”

She knew better than to believe that the hypercolony had extinguished the human capacity for violence and hatred. Violence happened every day, everywhere in the world. Wattmount County hadn’t seen a homicide in fifteen years, according to the newscast, but Cassie was willing to bet it still generated its share of bar fights and domestic arguments, maybe even a few racial set-tos. And internationally: no major wars, but there were enough violent rebellions and lethal border skirmishes to keep up the body count. It was only that these dangerous tendencies had been ameliorated or tamped down.

The relative peace since 1900 could be measured only statistically. Still, the numbers told a convincing story: a dramatic decline in violent conflict and all the consequences of war: famine, plague, economic collapse. Cassie’s high-school Poli-Sci text had credited material and moral progress for the change. And maybe that was true. But it wasn’t the whole story. If you inquired into the details of history—as countless Correspondence Society researchers had done—some obvious anomalies emerged. The crises averted, the battles won or lost, the cease-fires that eventually emerged, all seemed to turn on pivotal acts of communication or miscommunication. Radiograms vanished in transmission or were subtly altered. Bellicose ultimatums failed to reach their intended audience. Unbreakable codes were broken, battleships were dispatched to the wrong coordinates, artillery emplacements shelled empty trenches. All this was mediated through the radiosphere. And in the aftermath of the Great War, in the age of mass communication, public sentiment was swayed by cues far too subtle and clever to be called propaganda.

But why? For what ultimate purpose?

The Correspondence Society had offered only speculative answers. Maybe they had been closing in on the truth in the decade before ’07, when Ethan Iverson and Werner Beck produced conclusive evidence that the radiosphere was alive, a hypercolony (as Cassie’s uncle had called it) of microscopic living things. But that explained nothing. Did the hypercolony mean to keep humanity pacified as it pursued its own purposes? Or did it have some more specific use for the human species?

In any case, Cassie thought, though it had made human civilization more peaceful, the hypercolony itself was hardly nonviolent. You lost your parents, Leo had reminded her, not that she needed any reminding, and as she sagged toward sleep she had to suppress the memory of how her mother and father had looked when she had last seen them, their faces shattered and the contents of their heads splashed over the furniture where they had been sitting. What ever else that atrocity might be or mean, it was not the work of a peaceful entity.

She woke to the sound of rain on the cabin roof, of rain trickling down the crude cabin walls, of a pounding at the cabin door.

She sat up and saw Leo struggling out of his own sleeping bag. Feeble daylight penetrated the single window. Her dreams were still heavy in her head and she wondered whether this was one of them, until the door flew open and she saw the silhouette of a man in a yellow slicker and rain hat, his face obscure but his scowl unmistakable. “Park Service,” the man bellowed, giving Cassie a contemptuous glance but saving a fiercer glare for Leo, “and if you think you can come in here, cut these locks, have a little pot party or what ever you kids do, well, I got news for you.”

Cassie began scrambling out of her sleeping bag, which had become an entanglement, a cocoon she couldn’t shed. Leo managed to stand up, empty-handed and impotently angry. Cassie felt she could see it all through the stranger’s eyes: the Park Service man ru

“No, you look! You damage State property, you pay for it—that’s the law, young lady.”

But what she meant was, Look behind you. Past him, Cassie could see the open space between the cabin and the pines. She could see the Park Service man’s white pickup truck, mud-spattered to the midline. She could see Leo’s car next to it, the windows fogged and wet. She saw the car door opening, and she saw Beth climbing out, holding Leo’s bolt cutter in her right hand, her hair slicked to her scalp. She saw Beth ru

But the Park Service man didn’t look.

He toppled over in the doorway, his body half in and half out of the cabin. His head began bleeding immediately.

The force of the blow had knocked the bolt cutter out of Beth’s hand, and she stooped to pluck it out of the mud. Her mouth twisted in some combination of a grin and a frown.

“Beth!” Leo said.

“He was going to arrest us,” Beth said. “Or something.”

“Yes, but—oh, Christ! All right—okay, we need to get our shit together—Cassie, get Thomas up. We need to get away from here, now. Make sure you don’t leave anything behind. Beth, put the bolt cutter in the trunk and bring me a roll of duct tape.”

Leo used the tape to bind the hands and feet of the Park Service man so he wouldn’t be able to follow them when he woke up. If he woke up. He probably had a concussion, Cassie thought. At least. Or worse. Though by the way he had begun to moan, he wouldn’t be unconscious for long.

Cassie couldn’t help staring. “Roll up your sleeping bag,” Leo told her curtly. “I mean it. And do something about your brother.”

Thomas was sitting up in a tangle of blankets, crying. Cassie put her arm around him until he began to relax, then opened his small suitcase and helped him dress. Thomas wouldn’t meet her eyes, but he held up his arms while she pulled his last clean T-shirt over his head. A bubble of snot dribbled over his upper lip. Go on, cry, Cassie thought. Some things were worth crying over.

Leo took a key ring from the belt of the moaning Park Service man and carried it out to the white pickup truck. He came back with a laminated map of the local conservation area. He looked it over quickly while Cassie loaded her suitcase and Thomas’s into the trunk of Leo’s car. She helped Thomas into the backseat, wishing she had set aside a dry towel: the rain had doused them and they would be wet for the rest of the day, damp even under their jackets.