Burning Paradise

“No. Thank you.” Ethan cleared his throat. “I was seven years in Vermont, living in a cabin in the woods. Does that count as facing facts?”

“You killed some sims, you said?”

He had already given Beck a partial account of events at the farm house. “Four altogether.”

“Well, good. You did what you had to. But that’s self-defense. You were pla

“I managed to survive.”

“Right, but what now? What next? Find a new place to hide? Somewhere even deeper in the woods?”

Ethan shrugged.

“I wasn’t willing to settle for that,” Beck said. “What I’ve done these past seven years is make contact with people outside the Society, people who’ve had direct experience of the hypercolony or the sims.”

“I wasn’t aware such people existed.”

“You think it’s only scientists and scholars who can draw an inference or trip over a dangerous piece of knowledge? Think about it. I have reason to believe the sims constitute a tiny fraction of the human population, far less than one in a million. But there are at least a few doctors and coroners who’ve examined unusual bodies. Police officers who’ve witnessed perplexing deaths. And plenty of people who asked awkward questions and received unsatisfying or threatening answers. I made it my business to find those people.”

“How?”

“All sorts of ways. Small-town and local newspapers are a good resource. Local stories usually make it to print before they can be filtered through the radiosphere—the copy goes straight to the composing desk. The press services would never pick up an item about a traffic accident that left green matter all over the road, or, if they did, the story would get lost in transmission—but local papers often publish it.”

“So you run down believe-it-or-not stories in rural newspapers?”

“Much more than that. I have contacts on three continents. I’ve been able to put together a network of people who understand what we’re dealing with—understand it viscerally, not just theoretically—and who are motivated to take action.”

“What kind of action?”

“Every living thing is vulnerable, Ethan. Even the hypercolony.”

“You honestly think you’ve discovered a way to hurt it?”

“If it couldn’t be hurt it would never have expended so much effort attempting to hurt us.”

“Do you realize what you’re admitting?”

Ethan looked up, startled: Nerissa stood in the kitchen doorway, wearing fresh clothes and carrying a towel. Beck displayed a thin-lipped flush of irritation, quickly suppressed. “I hope you’re feeling better, Mrs. Iverson. What is it you think I’m admitting?”

“That you provoked it—the hypercolony. It isn’t just afraid of what we might know, it’s afraid of what you might do with that knowledge.”

“If that’s true, I hope its fears are fully justified.”

“And the people who died?”

“I didn’t kill them.”

“You’ve involved your own son in this.”

“I could hardly exempt him.”

“And Thomas and Cassie?”

“Please don’t misunderstand. I want them out of harm’s way as much as you do. Your niece and nephew are of no use to me.”

Ethan let Nerissa tell the story of the sim Winston Bayliss: what he had said, how he had died, and especially what they had discovered when they visited his home in Montmorency. “Mrs. Bayliss had had recent surgery, so she must have been human. But her son was a sim. How is that possible? Do you know anything about that?”

Beck was silent for so long a time that Ethan wondered whether he might refuse to answer. Then he said, “I can show you some recent research. You too, Ethan. This is work you haven’t seen. Come with me.”

They followed Beck to the small living room of this small house and waited as he sorted through the contents of a cardboard filing box stashed behind the sofa. He extracted a manila folder and put it on the low coffee table. Ethan and Nerissa sat down while Beck pulled up a chair. “I should warn you. Some of the photographs are graphic.”

The folder contained rec ords of the work of an English veterinarian named Wyndham. According to Beck, Wyndham had been culturing pseudochondritic cells to explore their interaction with living tissue. For that purpose he had equipped a laboratory with cages of white mice and a few larger animals.

He had begun by introducing the foreign cells to cultivars of yeasts, fungi and bacteria, without any useful result. Tissue samples from metazoans were slightly more responsive, but the cultures quickly became necrotic.

When Wyndham injected the pseudochondritic cells directly into living mice, the effect was quickly lethal—a simultaneous eruption of multiple aggressive tumors. (The file contained a photograph of a euthanized mouse on a dissection board: the tumors with which its body was riddled looked to Ethan like bloody raspberries.) But when Wyndham dosed the creatures with the same cells in an aerosol preparation—when he put the mice in a sealed chamber and allowed them to inhale dry, extracted spores—they showed no obvious ill effects over weeks and even months.

Not that they were unaffected. Wyndham’s dissections revealed that the foreign cells had migrated to the reproductive system of the mice. Gametes of both sexes were significantly altered. Under the microscope (and here was another, thankfully less visceral photo), haploid cells appeared fatter and included new and unusual organelles. “But the truly significant effect,” Beck said, “was on the next generation.”

Another photo of a dissection—a messy one. Nerissa made a disgusted sound and recoiled. Ethan was queasily reminded of what he had seen after the raid on his farm house.

Once again the dead mouse had been splayed on a dissection board. It possessed what appeared to be a complete set of internal organs, reduced in size and displaced to the borders of the abdomen. The bulk of the body cavity was occupied by a gelatinous green mass, some of which had already liquefied and begun to drain away as the photograph was taken. Tendril of this mass passed into and among the otherwise normal organs. A partial dissection of the skull revealed a hollow sphere of neural matter surrounding the same gelatinous green core.

“God, enough!” Nerissa said, grimacing.

Beck gathered up the photographs. “This would appear to be how sims are created. Pseudochondritic cells are shed by the orbital mass of the hypercolony. Some fraction of them survive entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Counting the enclosures in the ice cores lets us estimate the number of spores reaching the Earth’s surface in an average year. Inevitably, some small fraction of those spores will be inhaled by animals or human beings. Assuming even a single aspirated cell is able to alter all the gametes in a given individual, and given the density and distribution of fertile adult humans across the globe, there can’t be more than two or three hundred sims in all of North America—maybe four thousand altogether on the planet. Plus a population of altered animals, probably irrelevant but worth taking into consideration.”

Ethan said, “And the sims… are they fertile?”

“Do they breed more sims? No. Wyndham’s mice were sexually functional but genetically sterile. So were his dogs and other higher mammals. There are more photos—”

“No,” Nerissa said.

“Wyndham refused to work with primates, but we have every reason to believe the results would have been the same.”

“And these animals were otherwise normal?”

“Functionally and behaviorally. There was no way to tell a normal mouse from a sim, except with a scalpel.”

“Then Mrs. Bayliss wasn’t lying,” Nerissa said. “She really did give birth to that thing.”

Beck took two more photographs from his files. Ethan was relieved to see that they were micrographs, not images from a dissection table. “We’ve learned more about how the spores operate on the cellular level—this should interest you, Ethan.”