Burning Paradise

Meaning he wanted to talk to Beth alone. So Cassie grabbed her jacket and Thomas’s and left the room with Thomas in tow. She said she’d find di

After the meal—the waitress hurried them out so she could close up “before the fun starts”—Cassie took her brother by the hand and walked with him to the park at the center of town.

Henry Wallace Park, named for the former president, extended from the town hall on the north to the central post office on the south, and it was already filling with people. The park was pretty, Cassie thought, in a modest way—though probably at its best in summer, when the chinkapin oaks would be in full leaf and the air rich with the scent of mown grass. To night the skeletal limbs of the tree and the fading sunset created an atmosphere more somber than the mood of the crowd. But that wasn’t surprising. Armistice Day, ever since it had subsumed Thanksgiving as the nation’s end-of-November holiday, had always been about defying the first chill of winter, even here in relatively balmy southern Illinois. Colored lanterns had been strung around the bandbox. Behind a cluster of picnic tables, cheerful men in fla

Since 2007 Cassie had felt ambivalent about Armistice Day. Her high-school history classes had seemed overlaid with an invisible (and literally unspeakable) irony. Of course, the “century of peace and progress” hadn’t been as peaceful as everyone liked to pretend. It was true that the Great War with all its horrors had served as midwife to the Benelux Pact, the European Coal and Steel Alliance, the Treaty of Rome—all those dull but worthy defenses against war, along with generations of European statesmen whose names Cassie would forever associate with the smell of chalk dust and pencil shavings: Lord Lansdowne, René Plevin, Benedetto Croce. But there had been the Russian civil war, which had simmered hot and cold for almost a decade before the Smallholders Party finally unseated that nation’s creaking, brutal monarchy. There had been the countless border disputes that always threatened to erupt into something worse—Trieste, the Saarland, the Sudetenland. The ethnic “cleansings” that had persisted even after the European Accord on Human Rights. And even as the nations of Europe settled into the detente of the 1930s and 1940s, their reluctant retreat from empire had sparked countless Asian and African rebellions. It had been the Century of Peace only by contrast with what had gone before.

But under all that was the unmentionable truth about the hypercolony. In her last year of school Cassie had written an essay about the social and political movements of pre-Armistice Europe, and she had been impressed by the arrogance with which certain famous men (Hegel, Marx, Treitschke) had claimed the mandate of history—a word they often capitalized, as if history were a physical force, as predictable and as irresistible as the tides. The twentieth century knew better. At least that was what the textbooks said. The twentieth century had discarded the naïve idea that history had a built-in destination.

But history was exactly what the hypercolony had hijacked. It had grasped the raw and bloody meat of human history and shaped it to its own ends. What ever those ends might be.

The park was getting too crowded for Cassie’s comfort. She led Thomas across the street to the post-office grounds, a broad swale of grass where they could sit unobserved and watch the fireworks. The sky was dark now, the first stars begi

“Trust who?”

“Leo.”

Thomas pondered the question. Cassie liked this about her brother, that he was seldom quick to answer. Her own impulsiveness had gained her a reputation for being bright, while Thomas’s reticence made some people think he was slow—but neither impression was really correct. Sometimes Cassie spoke without thinking. And her brother, she suspected, often thought without speaking.

“Depends,” Thomas said at last. “He’s not mean. He thinks ahead. But that doesn’t mean he’s always right. Like when… you know.”

“When he shot that man,” Cassie supplied.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah, well… I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“Why shouldn’t I see it?”

Because knowing the truth doesn’t always make you stronger. “Because you’re twelve years old, for God’s sake.”

“But I need to get used to it.”

“Used to what? People being killed? That’s a horrifying thought!”

Thomas gave her a hard look. “You don’t think it’ll happen again? I know Leo thought the guy was a sim. He never meant to kill a real person. But the Park Service man? Beth could have cracked his skull. Maybe that’s what she meant to do. He could have died. Maybe he died anyway—we don’t know.”

“We can’t let ourselves get caught. If that happens, we lose, nobody wins.”

“I didn’t say it was wrong. All I’m saying is, it could happen again. That or something like it. Probably will happen again, if we do what ever it is Leo wants us to do.”

“Well…” She couldn’t honestly deny it. “Maybe.”

“Back in Buffalo, back when all I had to do was get up in the morning and go to school, maybe it mattered that I’m twelve years old. But it doesn’t matter to the sims. It doesn’t matter to the hypercolony. I don’t want to be protected, Cassie. I want to fight.”

Thomas was a pudgy child and about as belligerent as a Quaker. He tended to cringe in the face of an argument. But the expression on his face was fierce now, almost steely. He did want to fight.

He said, “I guess this is what it was like when—”

The fireworks interrupted him. A rocket sizzled up from the park and burst into a brocade of silver stars. The noise echoed from the quarried stone of the post office building, a sound as hard as a fist.

“What it was like when people went off to war,” Thomas finished. “The big war, I mean.”

Cassie had seen pictures in textbooks, of ranks of men in brown uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders: the Allied Expeditionary Force, off to join the battered Brits and French. And pictures of the muddy European trenches: Ypres, Passchendaele, the Marne, where countless young men had been slaughtered by other young men as bewildered and obedient as themselves.

“Leo’s not perfect,” Thomas said. “But who is? His father knows a lot, and his father trusts him. So yes. I guess I trust him. Do you trust him?”

On what terms? To make a decision and follow it to the necessary conclusion? To embrace even violence, if violence was necessary? To go to war?

Cassie surprised herself by nodding. “I do,” she said.

And in the end, what choice did she have? As recently as a few days ago she might have considered accepting the burden and promise of anonymity, might have been willing to settle for a circumspect, hidden life.

But she was a criminal now, an accessory to murder. The authorities knew of at least one death. If the Park Service man had died, he would be the second victim… and if he hadn’t died he would almost certainly have given the police a description of Leo, Cassie and Thomas. Local and regional police routinely shared reports by radio and fax, which meant those descriptions would have been available to the hypercolony, which meant it wasn’t only the authorities who might be paying attention. “Anonymity” was no longer an option.

The fireworks display began to build toward a climax, to the loud approval of the crowd in the park. Thomas watched gravely. The rocket’s red glare, Cassie thought. Rockets: a war technology, drafted into the service of celebrating peace. Some members of the Correspondence Society had once believed that larger and more powerful rockets could be used to send scientific instruments (or even human beings!) into orbit around the Earth—or farther, as in the science fiction novels she occasionally liked to read. But the building of rockets bigger than toys had been prohibited in the disarmament protocols that followed the signing of the Armistice. And maybe that, too, was the work of the hypercolony: the hive defending its high-altitude territory.