Burning Paradise

The conversation drifted from Mrs. Bayliss’s son Winston to the weather lately, and Nerissa checked her watch and said they had another appointment to keep. Mrs. Bayliss saw them to the door (a little abashed, Ethan guessed, at how garrulous she had been) and wished them well. “I’ll let Winston know you stopped by.”

“Thank you.”

“You want to leave a card or anything?”

“It doesn’t sound like your son is a likely prospect for us. When do you expect him back?”

“He said he’d let me know. He hasn’t phoned in a few days. That’s not like him. But he’s probably just having a good time down there in Florida. Last time I saw him he was cheerful as a chipmunk.”

And the last time I saw him, Ethan couldn’t help thinking, he was lying in a bed of fallen leaves, eyeless, dying.

Nerissa was somber in the car, and Ethan respected her silence as he drove back onto the turnpike. The sun beat through the windshield with a clarifying light.

Eventually she said, “So Mrs. Bayliss isn’t a sim.”

“Her knee, you mean.”

“Surgery or even an X-ray would have exposed her. And she wasn’t faking it. You saw the scar?”

He hadn’t, but Nerissa said she caught a glimpse when Mrs. Bayliss first sat down, the cotton skirt briefly rucking up to expose a line of suture marks stark as railroad tracks. “Obviously she’s not afraid of doctors.”

“But Winston was.”

The nature and origin of the simulacra had been debated by the survivors since 2007. Most assumed the sims were manufactured in their final adult form. But that had never been more than an assumption. Apparently a baseless one. “So what he told us was true,” Ethan said. “He was born to a human mother.”

“I guess so. But it’s a horrifying idea. That she actually gave birth to this thing, nurtured it, dressed it, sent it to school, and never noticed anything unusual beyond its reluctance to visit a doctor….” Nerissa shuddered. “That’s incredibly fucking creepy.”

“But it’s possible,” Ethan said. “The sims aren’t just approximate copies of human beings. In every detail except their internal structure, they’re perfect copies. It’s tempting to think that if you knew a sim intimately enough something would give it away, some subtlety it hadn’t quite mastered. But that’s wrong. Even Mrs. Bayliss couldn’t guess.”

“I suppose I thought the sims were made for a purpose—to be assassins—and after they did their jobs maybe they just, I don’t know, dried up and blew away in the wind. But if what she said is true, it means they can pass for years without being noticed. Anyone could be one.”

“Not you.”

She gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

“It’s been a while,” Ethan said. “But the appendectomy scar.”

She surprised him by blushing. “Yes, okay. True. And you had chest X-rays the winter you came down with pneumonia. So we can trust each other.”

“It’s the rest of the world we can’t be sure about.”

“Also, if Mrs. Bayliss is human and gave birth to a sim—how’s that work? Was her husband a sim, too? But that only pushes the question back a generation.”

“It’s not uncommon for one species to exploit the nurturing functioning of another species. It’s called brood parasitism.” In fact it was the same kind of parasitism Bayliss had claimed was happening within the hypercolony itself.

“But what’s the mechanism exactly? How does a perfectly ordinary woman in a perfectly ordinary town give birth to a non-human child?”

Ethan had no answer.

“And if they’re so perfectly human, we can’t even be sure about the Correspondence Society. You guys were always careful about using the U.S. Mail so the hypercolony couldn’t listen in, but what if you had a ringer among you? What if a sim was reading your monographs all along?”

He had thought about this. “There’s no way to rule out the possibility. It might be true. Even though we were in hiding, the sims had no trouble finding Cassie and Thomas. Or me. And Bayliss seemed to know exactly how much we knew about the hypercolony. So it would probably be smart to assume that the Society has been infiltrated.”

“So who can we trust? You, me—”

“That’s two. And probably Werner Beck.”

“Beck!” Nerissa said scornfully. “I never did trust Beck.”

15

ONE PART OF EUGENE DOWD’S CONVERTED barn had been set aside for paintwork, and Cassie watched with fascination as he worked on the stolen car. Even more fascinating—in a much scarier way—was Dowd’s ru

First he unbolted the car’s license plates and set them aside on his workbench. The plates were evidence, he said, and he would cut them apart with tin snips and bury the pieces in the yard before they left. Then he snapped off the Ford’s removable trim and moldings and used a power sander to rough up the paint. “Ordinarily,” he said, “I’d sand down to metal, but we’re in a little bit of a hurry here.” Cassie guessed this wasn’t the first vehicle he’d repainted, probably not the first stolen vehicle he’d repainted.

When Dowd bent to sand the side panels she could see the blades of his hips working under the denim sprawl of his jeans. Paint dust roiled up around him, but he wasn’t wearing a mask and didn’t appear to care. When he spoke (between bouts with the noisy sander) he kept his eyes on the Ford, as if Cassie and Thomas and Leo and Beth weren’t fully present, as if his words were addressed not to them but to something invisible that lived in the motor of the car. I was in a little town outside of Amarillo, name of it doesn’t matter, when Werner Beck found me. This was, let’s see, five going on six years ago now.

The town was where I grew up but I’d been gone a long time and I came back because I didn’t know where else to go. I’d been doing odd jobs, carpentry and electrical work mostly, out of the country, but I was done with that, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

So there I was, back in town and out of work. Since I left both my parents had died, but I didn’t know that till I got back. I wasn’t real good about keeping in touch. So the news was kind of a shock. Not that they were much of a family. My daddy drank when he wasn’t digging foundations and my mom worked as a beautician all her adult life. Cancer took her, and sometime later my daddy shot himself. Their house was sold off for back taxes. I came home to nothing, in other words. All I wanted was to curl up in a safe place and forget what I’d seen down in the Atacama, and all I got was more fuckin’ grief.

I rented me a little place at the edge of town and I guess I meant to sit there smoking weed and watching shit on TV until my savings ran out, but one day Werner Beck knocked on the door. At the time, I didn’t know who the fuck he was. I figured he wanted to collect a debt or sell me a Bible. But what he said was, Are you the Eugene Dowd who saw some unusual things in Chile last year? Which made we want to reach for a gun, except I didn’t have one. Relax, he tells me, I’m red-blooded all the way through. And I knew what that meant. So I told him to come in.

Naturally I wanted to know how he’d found me. He said he seen a piece in the local paper. He subscribed to what he called a clipping service. Clipping service sends him pieces from newspapers all over the country, big and little newspapers, if the article mentions certain words or phrases.

He didn’t say what those words or phrases were. But I knew the piece he was talking about. A column in the local rag, which is barely a real newspaper, mostly grocery coupons and classified ads. Well, some bored fucker wrote a column about what he called “colorful characters,” and I’d had the misfortune to run into this guy at a bar when I was too pissed for my own good—I told him a few things about the Atacama and he wrote it up like it was some big fucking joke. Local loser sees green men, that kind of shit.