Burning Paradise

“Well?” Ethan asked, after Beck had left the table.

She shrugged. “He’s well-groomed.”

“That’s your impression of him? Well-groomed?”

“A little oily.” Since you ask.

“He’s just trying to make a good impression.”

“On the unexpected spousal baggage?”

“That’s not fair.”

Perhaps not. The Society, Ethan had told her, didn’t have a strict policy on how much information members could share with their families. But it was understood that talking too freely could endanger one’s career—that was why the Society had come to exist in the first place. And much of what the Society’s i

But she resented being treated as an interloper. Or worse, a potential spy. As if she cared what these people discussed at their meetings. As if their ideas would ever be more to her than an unsettling and highly speculative hypothesis.

“Anyhow,” Ethan said, “it’s his ideas that count. And he’s a solid researcher. Since his wife died a few years ago, his work is all he has. And he can afford to devote himself to it.”

“He’s a widower?”

“Raising a son by himself.”

She allowed Ethan to change the subject. They talked about their plans for Oahu. Nerissa imagined a room with bamboo furniture, a breeze, the distant sound of the sea. And herself on a shaded veranda with a drink (something with gin and an umbrella in it) to extinguish any lingering thoughts about the forces that influenced human events.

On Saturday she wandered through the secondhand bookshops in Old Boston. Nerissa found bookstores soothing, especially antiquarian bookstores—the smell of old ink, the muted acoustics. She wanted something smart but not too challenging, and she eventually settled on a tattered second printing of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister. Back at the motel she staked out a table by the window of the bar and began to read. She had not reached the end of the first chapter when she became aware of a looming shadow. A woman of, she guessed, forty-something, carrying a drink and blinking from behind an impressively dense pair of eyeglasses. “You’re Ethan’s wife, right?”

Nerissa nodded cautiously.

“I thought so. I saw you with Ethan and Beck the other day.” Her voice was small (birdlike, Nerissa thought) and she spoke with a French accent. “I’m Amélie. Amélie Fournier. I’m one of the—well, you know. I’m with the Society. Do you mind if I sit with you? Or if you’d rather be alone—”

“No, please sit. I’m Nerissa.”

Amélie lowered herself into a chair. “Thank you. I’m playing hooky from the meeting. Is that the right expression? Playing hooky? I find I can endure only so much of staring into the abyss.”

“The abyss?”

“I mean the deep of the sky. And what lives there.” Amélie

wrinkled her face, an expression not quite approximating a smile. “Of course, I don’t know how much Ethan has discussed with you…”

“My husband and I don’t keep secrets.”

“Really? That would be unusual. But of course I shouldn’t be talking about these things at all. Mr. Beck would be upset with me. But I discover I don’t really care. I’m tired of Mr. Beck. I prefer the company of the unenthusiastic. By which I mean someone who is not so highly partisan. Mr. Beck considers himself a warrior. In his eyes we are all unsatisfactory soldiers. Some of us are reluctant to be soldiers at all, much to his disgust. I’m sorry, would you rather talk about something else? I can be a bore when I drink. People tell me so.”

“Not at all. It’s refreshing to get another point of view.”

“As opposed to your husband’s?”

“My husband’s opinion of Mr. Beck is somewhat higher than yours.”

“Yes, I am in a minority. I admit it. I think there are truths Mr. Beck is unfortunately ignoring.”

“Such as?”

Amélie hesitated. She ran a hand through her hair, which was cut in a style Nerissa hadn’t seen before, like sleek dark wings. “Each of us at this meeting represents a certain discipline. Mine is astronomy. I am an astronomer. Have you ever looked through a telescope, Nerissa?”

“Once or twice.”

“Optical telescopes are old-fashioned. Nowadays we look at the sky at invisible wavelengths. Or with photographic plates. The naked eye is an unreliable observer. But I was raised by a man whose hobby was astronomy. We lived in Normandy, in the west of the country. My father owned a large property there. Farmland. Far from the cities. The sky was dark at night. The stars were a constant presence. I became fascinated with the stars, as was my father. He used to say that there was something noble about the act of looking through a telescope. Human beings are small animals on an insignificant planet, but when we look at the sky—when we understand that the stars are distant suns—we begin to encompass an entire universe.

“As a child I was enthralled. Of course, I thought about the possibility of other worlds circling those distant suns. Inhabited worlds, perhaps. Planets perhaps with civilizations like our own, but more primitive or more advanced. Childish fantasies, but even a scientist may entertain such ideas.

“As an adult I discovered that a career in modern astronomy was more prosaic than I expected. My post-graduate project was a study of the propagative layer, the radiosphere, using high-frequency interferometry. My work met with resistance. It was hard to get cooperation or research time on the larger dish ante

“You believed what they told you? About the radiosphere being alive?”

“They offered me the evidence and allowed me to draw my own conclusion. Don’t you believe it?”

“I’m not a scientist. I guess you could say Ethan convinced me. His conviction convinced me.”

“Life,” Amélie said, “not of this world, and almost near enough to touch. At first it was only a surmise, but the evidence is now conclusive. Thanks in part to the work of your husband. The small seeds embedded in ancient ice cores. Think of that, a sort of gentle snow of alien life, very diffuse, sifting down from the sky, accumulating over centuries. And not dead, but still in some sense living. We are enclosed in an organism, which facilitates our communication and moves us, as a species, in a certain direction.”

Herds us, Ethan had once said, the way certain ants herd aphids.

“It’s a marvelous, a terrifying, an utterly unpalatable truth.” Amélie waved a hand at the sky—well, the ceiling—and came within an inch of knocking her drink to the floor. “For some years now we have consoled ourselves with the idea that the relationship between ourselves and this entity is symbiotic. Do you know that word? Mutually beneficial. It preserves and enhances the peace of the world, and in return… ah, what it takes in return is a matter of some debate. But Mr. Beck is more pessimistic. He suspects the relationship is purely parasitical. What the hypercolony wants, it will eventually take. Its intervention in our affairs is entirely selfish. If it wants us to be unwarlike, it’s so we won’t develop the weapons we might use to defend ourselves.”

“You think that’s true?”

“I don’t know. The evidence is controversial. But consider the implication, if what Mr. Beck believes is true. There is a form of life that is distributed throughout galactic space, and it depends for its survival on the exploitation of civilizations like our own. What does that mean?”

“I suppose… well, that civilizations like ours must be relatively common.”

“Yes, perhaps. At least common enough to have played a role in the evolution of this entity. This parasitical entity. This successful parasitical entity. The parasite is here, all around us—” Amélie leaned close enough that Nerissa could smell the alcohol on her breath. “But where are its previous victims? Where are these other civilizations like our own? Why haven’t they warned us against it? Why aren’t they here to help us?”