Burning Paradise

Noon came. Beyond the windows, the air itself looked pale and hot. Beth brooded in the shady common room with an equally sullen Eugene Dowd. Cassie sat in the kitchen, watching Nerissa heat precooked empanadas from the store across the street.

Cassie wanted to talk about what the sim Winston Bayliss had said back at Ethan’s farm house: the idea that the hypercolony might have been infected by some competing entity. Was that possible? Maybe, Nerissa said. Beck had claimed there was some evidence for it. But the hypercolony, like the devil, was a proverbial liar. Nothing it said could be trusted.

“Still, if it’s true, it could help us.”

“I doubt it, Cassie. It would only make the sims less predictable.” And more dangerous, the way a wounded and cornered animal is dangerous. She thought again of Ethan, on this the third day of his sojourn in the desert.

Beck and Leo came back in the still heat of late afternoon. Beck walked through the door with his shoulders squared and his head at a cocky angle, obviously pleased with himself. “We secured a small truckload of incendiary material,” he told Dowd. “We can move as soon as the radio gear is in place.”

Nerissa was mildly surprised. No other part of Beck’s plan had fallen into place so easily. But maybe it wasn’t terribly difficult to buy black-market explosives in a town that catered to the needs of a vast mineral-extraction industry.

Leo’s expression was the opposite of his father’s, a grim disdain. “Show them what else you bought,” he said tonelessly.

Beck gave his son a hostile stare, then opened the bag he was carrying in his right hand.

Inside the bag was an unmarked white plastic box. He put the box on the kitchen table and pried it open. Embedded in a sculpted foam protector was a graduated glass syringe and a dozen needles in sterile paper sleeves.

“Let me explain,” Beck said.

25

ETHAN CAME INTO SAN PEDRO DE Atacama at dawn, switching off the car’s heater as the sun cleared the horizon. He felt tired and light-headed, probably because of the altitude. The Atacama plateau was almost eight thousand feet above sea level. Perilously close to the stars.

And perilously close to other things. The Chilean government discouraged tourism in the Atacama, and according to Beck commercial air routes were designed to avoid this part of the desert. (Arrangements that had been made, he supposed, using the hypercolony’s standard tool kit: telephone calls and radio messages subtly and imperceptibly altered or redirected, apparently minor decisions cascading toward a calculated outcome, no single intervention so overt as to create suspicion or leave an obvious fingerprint….) The only real industry anywhere nearby was the Chuquicomata copper mine to the northwest. The railhead and ware house complexes on the outskirts of town mainly serviced the Chuquicomata and a few smaller mines. The town itself was a pueblo with some fifteen hundred souls in permanent residence, and it was instantly obvious that Beck’s soldiers might be inconspicuous on the road but would be impossible to lodge here without attracting attention. The only hotel in town was a three-story adobe building, a dozen small rooms enclosing a central courtyard and a waterless concrete fountain. Checking in, Ethan told the counter clerk he had come to see the Valle de la Luna.

“¿Es usted un geólogo?”

“Soy un geólogo por cuenta propia,” he said, leaving the clerk to figure out what a self-employed geologist might be. He signed a false name to the register.

He slept longer than he meant to, dreaming of a passage in one of his own books about the Glyptapanteles wasp. The Glyptapanteles wasp lays its eggs in the bodies of geometrid caterpillars, and the freshly-hatched larvae feed on the living insect—typical parasitical behavior, with the nasty twist that if the larvae sense the approach of a possible predator they cause their host to thrash in agony. Thus the victim is forced to put on a puppet-show of aggression, defending its murderers even as they devour its flesh. In his dream Ethan took no part but watched without emotion as the drama cycled through iteration after iteration. It was only when he woke that he felt a flush of horror.

Misplaced horror, he told himself as he showered. His sympathy was an anthropomorphism, a projection. The caterpillar was hardly more than a protein engine enacting a suite of encoded behaviors. A meat robot. As am I, except that in the case of Ethan’s species evolution had conjured a knowing self out of chemistry and contingency. I feel, therefore I abhor.

Without meaning to he had wasted most of a day in bed, and he meant to make better use of the time that was left to him. As the afternoon light faded he drove through the town to its industrial perimeter, the ware houses and fueling stations, the train yard where cargo containers and propane tanks huddled like the abandoned yurts of nomadic giants. From the road where he idled his car he could see a gang of mechanics servicing a hulking yard switcher, laboring under halide lamps as bright as minor suns.

It was hard not to feel hopeless. The weight of what Beck wanted to do was enormous, and there were too many ways it could go wrong. It was impossible to know how many agents (human or sim) the hypercolony might have placed in San Pedro de Atacama, impossible to know how much of Beck’s plan the hypercolony had already discovered or inferred. But these doubts might only be part of what Ethan was begi

He drove aimlessly, and he was many miles from town before he realized he was following the road Beck had described to him, the road that led to the hypercolony’s breeding ground. That would be fifty or more miles deeper into the desert, and Ethan had no intention of getting significantly closer. But the road was empty, the motion of the car comforting. A half-moon stood above the salt flats like a vigilant god. He was invulnerable in his unhappiness. He let the asphalt unspool a while longer.

He pulled over to the verge when he saw he’d added almost fifteen miles to the odometer. The air was cold and he switched on the heater, reminding himself again that he was riding the roof of the Puna de Atacama, only a thin skin of atmosphere between himself and the vacuum of space. He watched the horizon for the shaft of light Beck had described, but there was only the slow gyre of the stars.

He shivered and twisted the wheel to turn back. Traffic had been sparse, just a couple of box trucks and lowboys rumbling in the opposite direction, but a pair of headlights appeared in his mirror as he came off the gravel verge. Two unmarked white pickup trucks: the first, then the second, jockeyed abreast of him before passing at a furious speed. Ethan watched with relief as their taillights diminished in the distance.

They hadn’t come for him. But he was in a precarious place. He looked away from the road long enough to extract from the glove compartment the loaded pistol Beck had obtained and instructed him to carry. He put it on the empty seat beside him, not because he expected to use it but because it was reassuring to have it within easy reach.

He thought again of his dream, the Glyptapanteles larvae tweaking their host into a frenzied writhing. It was as good an analogy as any for what Winston Bayliss had claimed was happening now: the hypercolony, breeding its young in the nutrient warmth of human culture, had been attacked by a competing and equally alien predator. Both predator and prey were attempting to exploit human beings in their struggle. And if that was true, whose interests would Beck’s war serve? But to take the question seriously would mean abstaining from any action… a kind of induced paralysis, and maybe that was what the hypercolony hoped to achieve.