Burning Paradise

“It’s possible,” Beck said. “There are certain signs.”

“Such as?”

“All the cultures from Ethan’s ice cores are identical and compatible. But we’ve cultured fresher strains, and the two samples sometimes compete for resources in vitro until one is eliminated. But I’d hesitate to draw any conclusions from that.”

“Still, what Bayliss said—”

“Nothing a sim says is trustworthy, Mrs. Iverson. And all warfare is based on deception.”

“You’re quoting Sun Tzu.”

“I suppose I am. Of course, what emanates from the hypercolony isn’t even a conscious lie.”

Nerissa’s busy mind turned up a different quote, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons. “So it is possible there could be some kind of internal conflict going on.”

“Sure, but it’s impossible to know.”

Ethan came into the room fully dressed and with his suitcase in hand. “Packed and ready.”

They waited while Beck built a fire in the living-room fireplace and systematically burned the contents of his files, including Dr. Wyndham’s ghastly photographs. Nothing must be left behind to fall into the hands of the enemy.

Beck drove one hundred and fifty miles to the international airport in Kansas City, where he paid for long-term parking in a lot where the car wouldn’t be disturbed for at least three weeks. At the terminal he booked seats on the next available flight to Mazatlán. Not long after dark, a gleaming six-prop aircraft lofted them into

the night sky. Nerissa, sleepless in a window seat, watched prairie towns pass beneath the plane like luminous maps of a world she could no longer inhabit and which her traveling companions had sworn to dismantle. Several times she caught Beck looking at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read—suspicion? Curiosity? As if he wondered what secret motive she might be concealing.

But her motives weren’t secret, not secret at all. Let Beck conduct his war against a hostile abstraction; let Ethan join him, if that was what Ethan wanted to do. She would follow a certain distance down that road. But she was fighting a different war, for a different cause. And maybe Beck understood that truth about her. And maybe that was why she was so frightened of him.

21

THE MEXICAN HOLIDAYS HAD PREVENTED Eugene Dowd from checking the prearranged mail drop for three days now, and he resented it.

Mazatlán was a pretty town, but the concept of “silent night” was lost on the locals. The Christmas Eve street party had nearly deafened him. Live bands, fireworks, noisy crowds in the Mercado, after which everything shut up tight for Christmas Day. The mail drop was just an ordinary storefront mailbox service on a side street near the Centro Histórico, where Eugene was supposed to check a certain box number before proceeding to Antofagasta. But the business had been consistently closed, nothing to see but a locked door and a cardboard sign on which the words CERRADO POR NAVIDAD were printed in green crayon.

So he had been closeted in a three-story tourist hotel with Beth, Leo Beck, and what he continued to think of as the two kids, Cassie and Thomas. (Cassie wasn’t much younger than Beth, but her flat face and unimpressive figure made her look like a child to Eugene.) He shared his room with Beth, which helped pass the empty hours, but Beth’s charms had already begun to wear thin: she was clingy, easily frightened, and not half as smart as she liked to pretend.

Today Mazatlán was finally open for business. Eugene left the

hotel at ten in the morning and began walking toward the historical part of town, Leo Beck tagging along behind him. Eugene would have preferred to do this alone, but Leo, whose poorly-concealed hostility toward Eugene probably reflected the haste with which he had been dumped by Beth, had insisted on coming with him. And since Leo was Werner Beck’s son—it would be a mistake to forget that—Eugene had grudgingly agreed.

The street was crowded with the local golf-cart taxis called pulmonias, most of them ferrying tourists to and from the Zona Dorada. The sky was faultlessly blue above the brick-and-stucco storefronts, the temperature 70 degrees Fahrenheit and gliding steadily higher. The sheer pleasantness of the day was an invitation to relax, which Eugene was careful to decline. Everything he had seen and done in the Atacama, plus Werner Beck’s lectures on the nature of what he called the hypercolony, had been Eugene’s education in the operating principles of the world. All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peaceful: it was the peace that facilitated the fucking. These kids he was traveling with, they claimed to know that; but did they? No. Not the way he knew it.

They were within a block of the mail drop when Leo grabbed Eugene’s arm and said, “Wait, hold on….”

“What is it?”

Leo had come to a full stop and was squinting back down the avenue at the traffic of tourists and locals. Eugene hated being made conspicuous, especially in a strange place when he was in a state of high vigilance, and passing pedestrians were already craning their necks in an instinctive effort to see what ever this excitable turista was gawking at. He wished Leo had inherited even a fraction of his father’s sensible caution.

“Thought I saw someone,” Leo said, sounding a little sheepish now.

“Yeah? Who?”

“I don’t know. A face. A familiar face.”

“Familiar how? Someone you recognize?”

“No. I guess not.” Leo shrugged with obvious embarrassment. “Nobody I could name. Just a feeling, like, you know, I’ve seen that guy somewhere before….”

“A guy?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say an American. Not much of a tan. Forty or fifty years old.”

“Okay,” Eugene said. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Probably it meant nothing. Probably Leo was just nervous. But Eugene was carrying a pistol—the same pistol he had taken from Leo before they crossed the border, and which Eugene had brought into Mexico in a concealed compartment built into the dash of the van. It was tucked into a sling he had made from torn pieces of an old shirt attached to his belt, hidden under the XL tee he had worn to obscure its presence, and he was conscious of its weight.

Eugene’s father had taught him to shoot. The Dowds were farmers from way back, well-acquainted with long guns, but Eugene’s father had also been fascinated by pistols and he’d been an experienced target-shooter. He had owned a fully-registered antique Colt revolver, which he had treasured and which he had eventually used to take his own life after Eugene’s mother lost her fight with pancreatic cancer. Eugene blamed his father’s grief for the suicide, not the weapon. Eugene felt a sentimental attachment to the gun and wished he had inherited it; but he had been in Chile when his father used it to blow a half-dollar-sized hole in his left temple, and the Colt had been handed over to the police for lawful disposal. At the moment Eugene didn’t even have a license to carry. He had applied back in Amarillo, but by that time there were too many DUIs on his record. The laws around gun possession were a

The fact was, Eugene had come back from the Atacama kind of fucked up. How do you process an experience like the one he’d had in the Chilean desert? Finding both his parents dead, his mother of cancer and his father of .45-caliber self-administered euthanasia, had only compounded the problem. For a while it had seemed to Eugene that he was fated to end up a chronic drunk, pissing away his dole money in a secondhand Fleetwood trailer home, and that had been unsettlingly okay with him. The unexpected advent of Werner Beck was what changed everything. Or, no, not Beck himself, though Beck’s can-do attitude was bracing—it was the prospect of taking action, of recalibrating the mysteries of the Atacama as a personal attack and bending himself in the direction of revenge. Of going back to Chile, not as a victim but as a soldier. With other soldiers beside him and a suitable weapon in his hand. That was another promise Beck had made: there would be a weapon, one to which the green-on-the-inside-men and the spiders-with-faces were uniquely vulnerable.