Burning Paradise

Could Cassie have been there? Nerissa couldn’t picture her niece with a handgun, but the boy with whom she had left Buffalo, Leo Beck, was probably reckless enough to carry one. “So what do we do?”

“We go on,” Werner Beck said flatly, before Ethan could answer.

So they went on. Because Beck said so. Even though, in Nerissa’s opinion, Werner Beck was subtly mad.

She had been exercising a grim patience, cooperating with Beck because Beck had money for travel and a plan that might re unite her with Cassie and Thomas. Or at least with Beck’s son, Leo. It was possible that every step she took was carrying her farther from her niece and nephew, but it was equally possible (she hoped likely) that she had begun to close in on them—thus her patience.

But Ethan’s news about the killing of a sim unhinged all that studied calm. She wanted to run into the street and look for Cassie and Thomas, wanted to call out their names. She restrained herself from making that or some other stupid and impulsive gesture. Because, at least in this, Beck was probably right. The best they could do was to go to Antofagasta and make the co

And then what? A chilling thought occurred to her: What if Cassie had acquired through Leo a dose of Werner Beck’s madness?

Because it was madness—she was increasingly sure of that.

Beck bought seats on a commercial flight to Santiago with a co

Nerissa longed to discuss her fears with Ethan, but they had enjoyed very little privacy since they had arrived on Werner Beck’s doorstep. She could tell Ethan’s faith in Beck had been shaken by prolonged exposure at close quarters. “He’s not the man I knew ten years ago,” Ethan had admitted when they had a rare moment alone. “But no one else knows what he knows or has his kind of leverage.”

Maybe so, but what had Beck really accomplished? He talked about a worldwide network of researchers and proto-soldiers, all primed to confront the hypercolony and to destroy its facility in the Atacama desert, which was wonderful, and maybe, at a stretch, even plausible, but the details were suspiciously sparse. Beck had offered Wyndham in England as a typical researcher, and he had cited Eugene Dowd, the man Cassie and Leo and Thomas were supposedly traveling with, as a typical soldier. But that hardly constituted an army. And it was little more than speculation on Beck’s part that an attack on the Atacama site, even if it succeeded, would materially damage the hypercolony. There could be other such facilities elsewhere in the world. Beck said not—but pressed to explain his reasoning, he became evasive.

He had been generous with his money over the years, but according to Ethan it was money he had more or less inherited; all Beck himself had done was to create a network of front companies and dummy accounts that allowed him to administer his own income without leaving an obvious electronic trail. And she wondered how secure that income stream really was. Beck’s safe house had been a little shabby, and so was his customary wardrobe of tweed jacket and denim trousers.

None of this amounted to madness, but how should she parse his style of conversation (ma

And that was the crux of the matter. Beck was impervious to doubt. He believed in his army of followers, his implacable enemy, and his invincible strategy; and to question any of that was not only stupid but, in Beck’s eyes, a betrayal so heinous as to be unforgiveable.

Ethan, dozing next to the window, had left Nerissa with instructions not to wake him. The flight attendant served lunch as the plane curved over the Pacific west of Panama, but it was typical airline fare; he wasn’t missing anything. She found her attention drawn to Beck’s tray as he ate—the way he tugged the foil cover from the tray and folded it in thirds, likewise the wrapper from which he had extracted the cutlery. He took a sip from his thimble-sized cup of black coffee after every four bites. She counted. Four bites. Sip. Four bites. Sip. It was metronomic.

“What are you looking at, Mrs. Iverson?”

She jerked upright like a guilty schoolgirl. “Nothing… sorry.”

Beck glanced at Nerissa’s tray, now a clutter of torn packaging and half-eaten food. “The attendant should be around shortly to pick that up.”

She forced a smile and hoped it would end the conversation. Beck shifted his gaze to her face, but his expression of disgust hardly changed. “Since we have a moment, can I say something?”

“Of course.”

“I want to put this to you directly. Bluntly. Because it’s obvious you’re skeptical about what I mean to do in Chile.”

“I wouldn’t say—”

“All you want to do is reclaim your niece and nephew. And I have no problem with that. You’re not a soldier, and neither is Cassie or Thomas. If they’re in the company of Leo, they’re only an impediment to his work. Taking them back to the States is probably the most useful service you could perform.”

Wake up, Ethan! Nerissa thought. But Ethan didn’t stir. The plane lurched through a patch of turbulent air and she reached out to steady her coffee cup.

“But you’re wrong about what we’re doing in the Atacama. Others have expressed similar reservations. I’ve heard the argument for accommodation more often than I care to remember, though less often since 2007—the idea that the hypercolony has given us something valuable in exchange for a trivial diversion of resources. The idea that interfering with that puts both parties at risk and even constitutes a threat to world peace. I have to say, it’s a contemptible attitude.”

“I saw my sister and her husband murdered. I’m not inclined to forgive that.” Where was the flight attendant? The entire plane seemed to have been enveloped in a kind of su

“I know. But you’ve wondered, haven’t you, what we stand to lose if I’m successful?”

Sure she had wondered. If it was true that the hypercolony had molded the world the way a potter works wet clay on a wheel—if it had actually coaxed prosperity out of poverty and made a tractable chorus of the world’s discordant human voices—then yes: “Of course I wonder about the consequences.”

“As I see it, humanity will be forced to take responsibility for its own future.”

“For better or worse.”

“All of us who survived 2007 bear a heavy burden. People around us are allowed to go about their lives, while we carry this unspeakable knowledge. So we try to cope. We do what we have to do. You’ve elected to stand back and look after the children while others fight. That’s your choice, and it’s a good and useful one. But as a civilian, the consequences of what we do are not your concern. You need to let the soldiers fight the war.”

Between planes at Pudahuel Airport they sat in a lounge nursing drinks—mineral water for Beck, beer for Ethan, rum and Coke for Nerissa. She passed the hour between flights listening to an English-language news broadcast on a TV set behind the bar.