Burning Paradise

“Don’t go. The only reason you can’t see how crazy this is is that we’ve been neck-deep in crazy for years. Beck is delusional. There is no army. He doesn’t know what’s out there in the desert or where it came from or what it wants or how it can hurt you. Don’t go.”

Enough of the ambient light of Antofogasta seeped through the window that she could see his head against the pillow, eyes closed. She assumed he was asleep, but he startled her by saying, “Come back to bed.”

“Ethan?”

He didn’t move. Maybe he still wasn’t altogether awake. “I don’t have a choice, Ris.” His voice thick, words like an extended sigh. “This is what I have to do. There’s nothing else. Come back to bed.”

The cat pricked its ears and chased something invisible down the alley and out of sight. Nothing else moved. The air itself seemed sterile and empty. Then I’ll find my own way home, she thought.

23

THEY FOLLOWED THE HIGHWAY IN TWO vehicles: Eugene Dowd’s white van, with Dowd and Beth in it, and a sky-blue Ford Concourse Dowd had rented with the promise that he would return it to the rental agency’s Valparaiso branch. Cassie took turns at the wheel with Leo, occasionally checking the mirror to see if they were being followed.

The Trans-American Highway was an advertisement for the success of the Pan-American Common Market. It passed through some of the hemisphere’s most rugged and beautiful terrain, and it was a feat of large-scale multinational engineering to rival the Cha

Had she adapted to Leo, or was it the other way around? But it seemed to Cassie that there was no compromise in their unfolding relationship, only a series of surprising discoveries. Cassie had been with boys before, on what she preferred to think of as an experimental basis. Well, two boys. There had been Rudy Sawicki from high school, a math prodigy with bad skin who was nevertheless sweet and gently lascivious when they were alone together. But he wasn’t Society, and their relationship had collapsed under the weight of unspeakable truths. And there had been Emmanuel Fisher, whom everyone called Ma

From a distance Leo Beck had seemed like just another nervy, chain-smoking Society boy. Undoubtedly that was what Beth had imagined him to be. (Cassie was tempted to wonder what Leo had seen in Beth, but that was a mean thought.) So it had surprised her to learn that Leo was a habitual reader; it had surprised her to see how easily he related to Thomas. In bed, during the few but precious opportunities they shared during the drive south, Leo was gentle when she wanted him to be and fiercely eager at exactly the right moment—and he was good company afterward. With Leo beside her she could sleep soundly, even in a dark room in a strange country. As her eyes closed he kissed her ear or her forehead and whispered, “Sleep well.” Simple, comforting words. She cherished them. You too, she thought. Sleep well, Leo.

The Trans-American Highway crossed the Darien Peninsula on the Pacific side of the peninsula’s mountainous spine. Often she could see the highway winding ahead of them, a high steel ribbon where it spa

PART THREE

BURNING PARADISE

What is intelligence, exactly? Maybe that sounds like a simple question. We know—or think we know—what our own kind of intelligence is like. After all, we experience it on a daily basis.

But there are other kinds of intelligence. There is the intelligence of the hive—the complex behavior that arises from individually unintelligent organisms following a few simple behavioral rules in response to cues from the environment. And there is a kind of intelligence that inheres in the ecosystem as a whole.

Evolution, over time, has created entities as diverse as crinoids and mushrooms and harbor seals and howler monkeys, all without a predetermined goal and without devoting even a moment of thought to the subject. You might even conclude that this kind of thoughtless intelligence is more powerful and patient than our own. What are the limits to mindless intelligence? Or, and here’s an even more striking question, could mindless intelligence successfully mimic mindful intelligence? Could an entity (an organism, hive, ecosystem) learn to speak a human language, perhaps even deceive us into accepting it as one of our own and allowing it to exploit us for its own purposes?

Such an entity would lack real self-awareness. It would never experience the i

Why would such an entity want to fool us? Perhaps it wouldn’t. But mimicry is one of the common strategies by which a species gains an advantage over its competitors. We may hope the question remains for ever hypothetical. But the possibility is real.

24

LATER—AFTER STORIES HAD BEEN TOLD on both sides, mistaken assumptions corrected, difficult truths shared—Nerissa asked Cassie to help her put Thomas to bed.

“I can go to bed by myself,” Thomas said, but it was a token protest, and he seemed secretly relieved when Nerissa led him upstairs. She took him to the room she had shared with Ethan until he left, where she separated the single beds, one for Thomas, one for Cassie. Nerissa pla

Cassie made no objection, though she seemed slightly miffed at the idea of being relegated to a room with her little brother. Nerissa had seen the looks that passed between her niece and Beck’s son Leo, and she could guess what might have happened during the journey from Buffalo to Antofagasta. That was dismaying but not surprising, and Nerissa withheld judgment. But it was hardly practical to allow Cassie and Leo to share a room…. and Werner Beck would have vetoed the idea.

Nerissa remembered Leo as a truculent adolescent with an unfortunate penchant for petty crime, but maybe he’d changed. Or maybe his truculence had been an understandable reaction to his status as his father’s son. The awkwardness between Beck and Leo suggested the latter. Still, she would have thought Beth Vance was more Leo’s type. But Beth had apparently been more attracted to Eugene Dowd, the semi-literate garage mechanic Beck had shanghaied as one of his “warriors.”