Burning Paradise

“Maybe it’s true.”

“It doesn’t feel true. It doesn’t even feel likely. What are you saying, you think he’s completely sane?”

“No. But I’m not sure any of us rises to that standard.” There was nothing left to do but sleep. Ethan turned down the bed, stripped to his underwear and lay down. Nerissa curled up beside him and adjusted the blankets. Within minutes her breathing steadied into a gentle burr.

They had grown accustomed to sharing a bed during the drive to Joplin. Given the circumstances, that hardly represented an erotic opportunity. It was, however, a small reminder that they had never been officially divorced. Separated and effectively divorced, divorced in all but name; nevertheless, he was lying here next to his legally-ordained wife, feeling a different uneasiness than he would have felt with a stranger. He couldn’t suppress all the memories she provoked. She had changed in seven years. But she smelled the same, and he found himself imagining she tasted the same—her mouth, her skin… not a wise thought.

He rolled away from her, toward the window. Nerissa had opened the curtains before she turned in, a habit of hers. She used to say that a view of the sky made her feel less confined. Apparently that was still true. But all Ethan could see was blackness and a few pale stars. Of course his old enemy was up there, too, ethereal and tirelessly observant, as enigmatic and as perversely fascinating as ever. Did he hate the hypercolony the way Beck claimed to? Of course he did. It had taken away everything that mattered to him. It was relentlessly, tirelessly lethal.

The difference was that he knew it didn’t hate him in return. He didn’t believe the hypercolony was capable of that or any other emotion. It had the magnificently indifferent lethality of a poisonous mushroom or a venomous insect.

He hated it, but he respected it. Maybe even admired it.

Would he help Beck exterminate it, if that was possible? Yes. And in the unlikely event they succeeded, he would rejoice. But unlike Beck, unlike Nerissa, he would also grieve for the passing of an extraordinary living thing.

And maybe that made him an unlikely soldier. And maybe Beck had known that about him all along.

19

THEY SET OUT IN A TWO-VEHICLE CONVOY, Eugene Dowd driving the white van and Leo at the wheel of the repainted Ford. Cassie and Thomas chose to ride with Leo, while Beth, to no one’s surprise, elected to ride in the van with Dowd.

Cassie watched the way Leo drove. He was careful to keep the van in sight as they followed the long road from Salina through Great Bend and Dodge City and across the northwestern tip of Texas, out into the dry lands under a flat December sky. If Dowd stopped for gasoline or a bathroom break, Leo would pull in behind him. If Dowd crept too far ahead, Leo would accelerate until the van was back within a comfortable distance. He was as grimly vigilant as a hunting animal.

At first Cassie wondered whether this was because of Beth—because Leo was jealous, in other words. Their relationship had cooled since they left Buffalo, but Leo might still resent Dowd for moving in on his girlfriend. Which Dowd had done as quickly and gleefully as if she had been gift-wrapped and delivered by a generous providence.

But it was more likely the gear in the back of the van Leo was concerned about. Maybe because it had seemed so fragile and incomplete, considered as a weapon. Maybe because it was the only meaningful weapon they possessed.

The highway was one of the flagship federal turnpikes constructed under the Voorhis administration more than fifty years ago, wide and well-maintained. It crossed the desert like a dark ribbon, making silvered oases where hot air mirrored the sky.

After sunset they stopped at a public campground in Arizona. The December evening was cool—cold, now that the stars were out—but they built a fire in a stone-lined pit and roasted hot dogs they had bought at a convenience store outside Tucumcari. Dowd had supplied himself with a six-pack of beer, which he shared with Beth. He talked incessantly, but not about anything serious, and after a few beers he sang a couple of country-and-western songs and encouraged Beth to come in on the choruses. Then he put his arm over Beth’s shoulder and led her toward the canvas tent he had pitched. Beth spared one gloating look for Leo, who refused to meet her eyes.

Cassie made a bed for Thomas in the car: a sleeping bag on the backseat, windows open a crack to let in some air. Then she went to sit beside Leo, who stirred the embers of the dying fire. “Dowd’s an asshole,” she said.

Leo shrugged. “I guess he serves a purpose. My father trusted him. Up to a point, anyway.”

Dowd had expressed his belief that Leo’s father was still alive and that they would meet him somewhere in Mexico or farther south. That was the plan, anyway. The plan had been in place for a couple of years, a private arrangement between Dowd and Werner Beck, and Leo’s arrival had set it in motion.

Cassie tried to ignore the faint but unmistakable sounds of Dowd and Beth making love in Dowd’s tent. She hoped Leo couldn’t see her blushing. To make conversation, or at least a diverting noise, Cassie talked about her family—her original family, back before ’07, and the house they had lived in, what little she could remember of that ancient, fragile world. Leo seemed willing to listen. He even seemed interested. And when Cassie fell silent he stirred the ashes of the fire and said, “I lost my mom when I was five years old. A car accident. I survived, she didn’t. The thing is, I can’t even remember what she looked like. I mean, I’ve seen pictures. I remember the pictures. But her face, looking at me, those kind of memories? Not even in dreams.”

Cassie nodded and moved closer to him.

She shared Leo’s tent that night—chastely, but she was conscious of his long body beside her as he turned in his sleeping bag, the warmth and scent of him hovering under the canvas.

She thought about Beth’s defection to Dowd. It wasn’t really so surprising. Beth was a Society kid, and one thing that marked Society kids was a heightened sense of personal vulnerability. Maybe for that reason, Beth had always been drawn to guys who seemed powerful or protective. Which was how Leo must have seemed to her, back when he was boosting cars and hanging around with petty criminals. But Dowd was older, had traveled farther, was more persuasively dangerous.

Sometime after midnight Cassie snuck out to pee, squatting over the sand behind a mile marker. The highway was empty, the desert a vast silence. A quarter moon leaned into the shoulder of the western mountains. Mexico, she thought. Or somewhere farther south. A rendezvous with Leo’s father. And what then?

In the morning they crossed the Colorado River at Topock and pushed west, heading for what Dowd called a “mail drop” somewhere in Los Angeles. Strange how peaceful the desert seemed, Cassie thought. Something about the sunlight, the solemn authority of it. Then through Barstow, where they stopped at a roadside store and Thomas gawked at a terrarium populated by pea-green lizards, and across the San Gabriels into the Los Angeles basin, the distant city white with gneiss and marble. “Where they make movies,” Thomas said, and yes, Cassie said, Hollywood wasn’t far away, nor were the vast industrial plants that manufactured commercial aircraft, including the planes her little brother excitedly pointed out in the cloudless sky: six-prop passenger aircraft arriving or departing from Los Angeles International Airport, even a few of the new jetliners. The mail drop turned out to be a box-rental place in Vernon, and there was nothing to pick up but a set of export permits and cartage documents that covered the contents of the van—but that was okay, Dowd said; there would be other mail drops along the way, maybe with news from Leo’s father. From there they drove south past thriving farms and olive orchards, road signs not just in English but in Spanish and Japanese, enormous federal aqueducts that soared above the road, seasonal-workers’ housing complexes with stucco facades in rainbow colors. How much of this would survive, she wondered, if the machine in the back of Dowd’s van did what Dowd believed it would do? Because, like any other good and necessary act, destroying the hypercolony might have unintended consequences.