Burning Paradise

The simulacrum hesitated as if considering its answer, but Ethan put that down as theater: these creatures lied with gestures as easily as with words. “We have a common interest, Professor Iverson. It’s complicated—”

Ethan put the barrel of the pistol to the creature’s head. “Just speak.”

“You know what I am. I’m the same sort of thing that killed so many of your colleagues seven years ago. But I represent a different interest.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Most of what the Correspondence Society conjectured is true. The radio-reflective layer around the Earth is an active, living entity—that was a clever deduction and a correct one. It constitutes the body of what you call the hypercolony. The hypercolony is a living thing, another correct conjecture. But like any living thing, the hypercolony is mortal. It’s also subject to infection and predation. I represent an autonomous parasitical network that has infected the hypercolony and is struggling to control it. My interests are inimical to the hypercolony’s interests. I believe you’re capable of understanding that. That’s why I came to you unarmed and alone.”

The sim had simply reiterated what the Society had already inferred, with the addition of that claim about a “parasitical network.” Ethan would consider the plausibility of it some other time. “What exactly do you want?”

“I want your help. I can explain, but I’ll need more time.”

“Why would I help you do anything?”

“It would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. And it might save the life of your niece.”

Startled, Ethan tightened his finger on the trigger of the pistol.

“That wasn’t a threat,” Bayliss said.

“What do you know about my niece?”

“It’s not safe here. It’s not safe for either of us. Take me away, and I’ll explain.

Of the many humiliating aspects of Ethan’s life since the events of 2007, perhaps the most demeaning was the veneer of craziness he had been obliged to assume. He refused to own a telephone, a television or a radio; he lived inside a lunatic’s cordon of security devices; he maintained an arsenal of handguns and rifles in his attic; and now there was a captive in his cellar, bound with duct tape and shot through the leg. How would that look to an outsider? Nothing short of rabidly, dangerously, self-evidently psychopathic.

It had been years since he had socialized with anyone who shared his ideas. Most of his old friends and colleagues were dead or isolated. Should he need to defend his sanity, he could call no living witnesses. He still had his letters, his Society papers, his unpublished research. But those would have looked as about as crazy as he appeared to be.

His ex-wife Nerissa would have understood all this, as would any of the surviving families of Correspondence Society insiders, and in his loneliness he had been sorely tempted to talk to her—but there was no way Ethan could get in touch without putting her at risk. He had remained in contact with the Society’s financial and intellectual leader, Werner Beck, but only by mail… and Beck was, if anything, more complexly paranoid than Ethan himself.

The sim calling itself Winston Bayliss had implied that the life of Ethan’s niece, Cassie, was somehow at risk. Like everything else the creature said, that might be a lie. Sickeningly, however, it might equally well be true. Ethan hadn’t seen his sister-in-law’s daughter for seven years now. He remembered Cassie as a quiet child, moody but thoughtful and easy to like. She would have turned eigh teen this year.

What did the hypercolony want with Cassie Iverson?

The question was probably unanswerable, a distraction. Coming up from the cellar to the kitchen, he glanced at the clock. An hour had passed since the sim’s arrival. Too long. He pictured himself dousing the floor of the farm house with kerosene—he kept jerricans of it in the barn where his car was parked—and setting it on fire. Burn the farm house, burn the barn, burn Winston Bayliss. Get behind the wheel of his old Ford and drive away. The charred bones and skull in the cellar, if they were discovered, would raise questions, but by then Ethan would be long gone… and he doubted any merely human agency could track him down.

But if the best he could hope for was to live out the rest of his life in some new and even more hermetic state of solitude, he might as well burn himself along with the building.

I want your help, Winston Bayliss had said. It might save the life of your niece.

But the thing in the cellar couldn’t be trusted. That was the bottom line.

He cradled the pistol in his hand. Killing the sim might be a tactical error, but it was the closest thing to revenge he would ever be able to take.

He was headed for the cellar when the alarm sounded a second time.

5

LEO, WHOSE FATHER MADE SURE HE received every year a generous selection of fake ID and matching credit cards, rented a room in a roadside motel. The motel—pine forest on three sides, an empty pool behind a chain-link fence—was shabby but quiet in the off-season. Leo and Beth had signed in as a couple, so Cassie had to hurry from the car to the room with Thomas on one hand and her suitcase in the other in order not to be seen from the lobby. Sunset was fading from a cloudless sky, and although Cassie took only a cursory interest in astronomy she guessed the bright star on the horizon was the planet Venus. She caught a glimpse of it as the door closed behind her. One clear, cold eye.

The air of the room carried an undernote of mildew and Lysol. There was a small TV on the pitted and ring-stained dresser, and Thomas gazed at it with undisguised longing. Aunt Ris had not owned a TV set, on principle. Cassie had occasionally attempted to raise counter-arguments—even if television broadcasts were subtly deceptive, you could watch them as long as you kept that in mind, couldn’t you?—but her aunt’s ban had been non-negotiable.

Cassie guessed she understood. All radio and television signals were bounced through the radiosphere. That had been true since the days of Marconi and Edison. She remembered a photograph from her high-school history text, of Marconi and a crew of assistants at an experimental ante

So all radio and television was modulated by the radiosphere, as everyone knew. What everyone didn’t know was that the radiosphere was the distributed body of a living entity, and that the signals passing through it didn’t necessarily pass unaltered.

Three years ago Cassie had discovered a box of Correspondence Society monographs buried in the hallway cupboard where Aunt Ris kept the things she couldn’t bear to throw away but never looked at. The papers had belonged to Cassie’s parents; perhaps they had come to Aunt Ris after the murders, as a macabre heirloom, much like Cassie herself. Therefore she had had no compunction about rooting through the box and reading anything that captured her attention.