Burning Paradise

2

EARLY IN THE MORNING, NOT LONG AFTER the first sunlight touched the barren branches of the maple trees and began to burn the skin of frost out of the shadows, a man approached Ethan Iverson’s farm house. The man was alone and walked slowly, which meant Ethan had plenty of warning.

Ethan watched the stranger’s progress on a video screen in the attic room in which he kept his typewriter, his Correspondence Society files and a small arsenal of firearms. He had been in the kitchen when the alarm sounded, preparing his standard breakfast of eggs and ham fried in an iron skillet. Now the meal was going cold on the stovetop downstairs, the eggs congealing in grease.

Ethan had lived alone in the farm house for seven years—seven years and three months now. Entire weeks passed when he spoke to no one but the check-out girl at Kierson’s Grocery and the counter clerk at Back Pages Books, his two inevitable stops whenever he drove into Jacobstown for supplies. One useful device by which a solitary man could keep touch with sanity, he had discovered, was a regular schedule, strictly obeyed. Every night he set his alarm clock for seven o’clock, every morning he showered and dressed and finished breakfast by eight, regardless of the day of the week or the season of the year. Just as meticulously, he was careful to maintain and keep in good repair the array of motion detectors and video cameras he had installed on the property not long after he moved in.

For seven years, that system had registered nothing but a few stray hunters and mushroom pickers, a religious pamphleteer who believed God had granted him an exemption from the many and conspicuous NO TRESPASSING signs on the property, one determined census taker, and on two occasions a member of the family of black bears that lived beyond the western boundary of Ethan’s property. Every time the alarm sounded Ethan had hurried up to this attic room, where he could see the intruder on his video monitor and evaluate the possible threat. Every time—until now—the intruder had proved to be essentially harmless.

He switched the monitor to a new camera as the man walked up the unpaved access road toward the house at a steady pace. The man Ethan saw on the monitor seemed surpassingly ordinary, though a little out of place. He was probably not older than twenty-five, bare-headed and brown-haired and twenty pounds overweight, dressed like a city dweller in a drab overcoat and black shoes that had surrendered their shine to the moist clay of the road. From his looks he could have been a real-estate agent, come to ask whether Ethan had considered putting the property up for sale. But Ethan was fairly sure the guy wasn’t even human.

Of course, the man’s physical appearance meant nothing. (Unless the very blandness of him could be construed as a strategic choice.) What tipped Ethan off—what was, perhaps, meant to tip Ethan off—was the way the stranger gazed at each camera lens as he passed it, as if he knew he was being observed and didn’t care, as if he wanted Ethan to know he was coming.

As the man approached the thousand-yard mark, Ethan considered his choice of weapons.

He kept a small armory up here. Mostly hunting rifles, since those could be acquired easily and legally, but including a couple of military-style handguns. In the rack by the window he kept a fully-loaded Remington moose rifle with a German scope, and he had trained himself in its use well enough that he could easily pick off the invader at this distance with a single shot from the attic’s small window. The peculiar anatomy of the simulacra made them less susceptible to injury than human beings, of course, but they were far from invulnerable. A well-placed head shot would do the trick.

Ethan thought about that. It would be the simplest way to handle the situation. Pick off the invader, then pack a bag and leave. Because if the hypercolony had located him, it would be suicidal to stay. If he killed one sim, more would come.

…if he was sure this man was a sim. Was he sure?

Well, his instinct was pretty strong. If he had to bet, he’d have put money on it. But he couldn’t trust a man’s life to instinct.

He eyed the long gun wistfully but let it be. Instead he picked out a shotgun and a device that looked like a stocky pistol but was built to deliver 300 kilovolts from a pair of copper prongs. His research had led him to believe the latter would an effective short-range weapon against a simulacrum but probably not lethal to a human being. He had not, however, tested this theory.

He watched the monitor a moment longer, trying to shake off his fear. He had known this day might come. He had pla

He tucked the shock pistol into his belt and made sure the shotgun was loaded. He put a pair of extra shells in his shirt pocket. He felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder, but there wasn’t time.

Death came up the creaking porch stair and politely rang the doorbell. Ethan went down to answer.

The green-on-the-inside men (and women: Ethan reminded himself that some of them were women) had already cost him his marriage and his career. They had achieved that remarkable feat over the course of a single day in 2007.

On that day Ethan had been a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus, author of several well-received journal papers and a couple of reasonably successful popular-science books, an asset to his department and an active researcher who could command a cadre of undergraduate students. His specialty was entomology but lately his research had taken him into the field of paleobotany, the study of ancient plant life; he had joined a team of researchers who were isolating airborne spores from ten-thousand-year-old Antarctic ice cores. He was also engaged in a more clandestine sort of research—the kind that interested the Correspondence Society.

The members of the Correspondence Society were scientists and scholars, but they never published their findings in peer-reviewed journals. The Society was known only to itself, and its members were sworn to secrecy. As a grad student Ethan had been introduced to the Society by his mentor at MIT, a man whose mind and ethics Ethan had admired without reserve. Even so, Ethan had been skeptical at first. The Society had sounded like something eccentric and deeply old-fashioned, a survival of some Edwardian dons’ club that had once flourished in the cloisters of Oxford or Cambridge. He would have dismissed it as a joke—a frankly preposterous joke—if not for the names associated with it. Mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, many with impressive pedigrees, and the roster of the dead was even more impressive, if true: Dirac, von Neuma

He had been warned of the risks he would be ru