Burning Paradise

24

_ANTOFAGASTA

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 planned to spread a blanket on the carpet and sleep by the door, guard-dog style.

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.”

At least Dowd—unlike the rest of Beck’s supposed army—had actually shown up for the battle.

Thomas’s eyes closed and his breathing steadied almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Nerissa tucked the blankets around him while Cassie stood at the window, looking past the wrought-iron balcony railing to the dusty back alley where a garbage truck groaned through the heat. “The next thing we need to do is get you and Thomas back to the States.”

Cassie closed the curtains. “Really? Is that even safe? After what happened with the man we killed—”

“The man Leo killed.” Nerissa had cringed when she heard this part of their story, but she hadn’t shied away from dealing with it. “There won’t be any legal problems. If it happened the way you said it did, there’s no substantial evidence to connect you or Thomas to the crime.”

“Except for the man who saw us… the man Beth hurt.”

“At best, the police might have a vague description. And even if, somehow, they did come after you, it wouldn’t be hard to put together an alibi. But you won’t need one.”

“If the sims find us it hardly matters about the police.”

That was unfortunately true. “But it’s not you they’re after. You’re in far more danger here than you would be back in Buffalo.”

“No.” Cassie shook her head. “You’re wrong. It was me they came for. The sim that got run over on Liberty Street was looking for me.”

“You don’t know that. It might have been coming for me, or it could have been a ruse, or a feint, or even a way of getting at Beck through you and Leo.”

“I saw it looking at me from the street. It knew I was there.”

She seemed unwilling to admit any other possibility, and the

discussion was making her agitated. “Okay, Cassie, but even so, all we can do is take care of each other the best we know how. You, me, Thomas—”

“And Uncle Ethan?”

“Maybe. He’s in—”

“I know. He’s in the desert, looking for a place for Leo’s father and his soldiers to meet up,” Cassie said. (All Beck’s imaginary soldiers, Nerissa thought.) “Are we going to wait for him to get back?”

“I’d like to. But we may not have time. We need to be on a plane out of here as soon as it can be arranged.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, we can’t keep on exposing Thomas to this kind of danger. It’s not right.”

“Leo’s staying.”

“I’m not responsible for Leo. What Leo does is between him and his father.”

It had been Beck’s idea to send Ethan to San Pedro de Atacama.

According to Beck the plan was simple: get a mobile radio source and signal generator within effective range of the Atacama facility, shut it down by interfering with its internal and external communications, and destroy the facility while its inhabitants were incapacitated. Beck claimed to have laboratory evidence that this scheme would work. His faith in it was messianic and, Nerissa suspected, gravely misplaced.

But Ethan considered the idea plausible, and at Beck’s suggestion he had agreed to travel to San Pedro de Atacama to scout out a place where a truck full of radio gear, a similar cargo of incendiary material, and Beck’s supposed fifty-man army could assemble for the attack.

He had been gone for two days now. Because it would have been suicidal to report by telephone, there was no way of knowing whether or not he had been successful. And because he had been away, he hadn’t seen the most recent evidence that Beck’s scheme was jury-rigged if not downright delusional.

The signal-generating device, which Beck had designed himself, had arrived in the back of Eugene Dowd’s van, but the amplification and broadcast gear Beck had ordered from Valparaiso hadn’t been delivered—hadn’t even been shipped, according to the freight service; the vendor had declared bankruptcy. Beck sulked for an afternoon, then told Nerissa he could make do with off-the-shelf equipment from another supplier… which would nevertheless have to be discreetly purchased and delivered, delaying the attack by at least a few days more.

And there was the question of his army. Fifty men, Beck had claimed. More like a platoon than an army. Fifty men good and true, recruited from three continents, to be housed in five safe houses scattered across Antofagasta. But at last report none of the alleged volunteers had succeeded in leaving their native countries. For replacements Beck had managed to recruit a dozen men from the pool of unemployed stevedores at the dockside union hall. These men believed they were being hired to transport liquor to an unlicensed ware house in San Pedro de Atacama, and while they would be useful for lifting and carrying duties, not even Beck envisioned them as combatants.

It didn’t matter, he insisted. As long as the radio gear and the incendiaries were delivered to the desert, a handful of men—even three or four—could successfully conduct the attack. If all went well.

That was the plan on which Ethan had wagered his life.

Downstairs, Nerissa found Beth Vance sitting by herself in the common room near the kitchen. Beth was still coming to terms with the news that her father was alive.

A single unarmed sim had approached John Vance on the day Cassie and Thomas fled Buffalo. They had seen a body being removed from the apartment building where Beth lived with her father, but that had been the remains of the sim, which John had elected to shoot rather than engage in conversation. John had since gone into hiding, Nerissa didn’t know where, but someone in Buffalo would be able to put him back in touch with Beth when they got home.

Beth looked up at Nerissa with an expression that was hard to decipher. “Were you with my father when he killed the sim?”

“We can talk about that tomorrow.”

“I’d rather talk about it now.”

“Okay,” Nerissa said. “If you like. The answer is no, I wasn’t there. I’d left for home by then.”

“But you spent the night?”

“Yes.”

“I knew about that. He told me he was seeing someone. He just didn’t say who.” She darted another glance at Nerissa, looked away. “It wasn’t the first time. He doesn’t usually see Society women, though. Most women he doesn’t see more than once. Actually, that’s why I was at Leo’s place. He didn’t care where I spent the weekend, as long as I was out of the house.”

“Maybe so. And maybe it was a mistake, my seeing him. But I’m sure he’s worried about you.”

“Not worried enough to come looking for me. Not the way you came after Cassie and Thomas.”

“That’s not a fair comparison. He doesn’t know anything about Werner Beck or Leo. Your father never paid attention to Correspondence Society business.”

Which, ironically, was one reason Nerissa had accepted John’s invitation to spend the night. Like John, she had been connected to the Society by marriage; like John, she harbored an abiding anger at the way the Society had disfigured their lives.

“Well, that’s true,” Beth said. “He doesn’t even like me going to survivor meetings. Probably we wouldn’t have had anything to do with the Society, except he needed the pension. It wasn’t much but it made a difference. Do you like my father?”

“We’re friends, but I don’t think it was going anywhere.”

“Not your type, huh?”

“Maybe we just weren’t the people we thought we were.”

“He can be a real shit. I’m not going back to him.”

“What?”

“Don’t look so shocked. I know him better than you do. I’ll go back to the States, but I’m not living with him again.”

“But why?”

“He never, you know, touched me or anything. But he likes to look. And he likes to say things.”

After a few wordless seconds Nerissa said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. People aren’t always what you think they are. But I guess you know that.”

Nerissa slept fitfully by the door of the bedroom, startled awake by every sound the house made in its negotiations with the cooling night. And when she did at last fall into a deeper sleep, she slept shamefully late. She needed to talk to Beck about arranging her flight to the United States—she was determined not to spend another night here; she would take the kids to a hotel if that was necessary—but by the time she was dressed and downstairs Beck and Leo had already left on some errand. They would be back—Cassie relayed this datum—before dinner.

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

_{SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA}

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 beginning to recognize as a gathering bout of depression, the circling wolves of despair. He couldn’t help thinking about Nerissa: a long-closed door had opened between them, and he had let it fall shut again. For the sake of what? This mad act of human impudence?

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.

Something Nerissa used to say: We see through a glass, darkly. From the Bible. The New Testament, if Ethan recalled correctly. Corinthians? Nerissa would know.

In the dark glass of his rearview mirror Ethan saw more headlights coming up fast. He put a little extra pressure on the gas pedal, but the vehicles continued to close with him.

We see through a glass, darkly… Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known…. .There was something on the road ahead, obscured by the moon-shadow of an upright granite outcropping. He slowed until he could make out the obstacle, which he belatedly recognized as the two pickups that had passed him earlier, one in each lane of the highway, both now aimed in his direction, both stationary and dark. He swerved to pass on the verge when their high beams flashed on, blinding him. At which point it became impossible to do anything but stand on the brake or drive off the road.

He managed to stop. The pistol slid from the passenger-side seat to the floor. He was groping for it when a man tapped on his side window with the butt of a flashlight. “Dr. Iverson?”

Ethan’s fingers closed on the grip of the pistol. He straightened up. The man standing outside the car wore jeans, a ball cap, a work shirt, and a bland expression. His eyes glittered in the moonlight. Ethan shot him through the window of the car.

Safety glass exploded in a shower of fragments. By the time Ethan opened his eyes again the man—the sim—had dropped out of sight. But the odor of green matter mingled with the gunpowder stink of the fired weapon, making him think dazedly of chlorophyll, vinegar, bread mold, crushed leaves….

The headlights that had been following him belonged to two more identical pickups. They fishtailed to a stop behind Ethan, boxing him in before he could put the car in reverse. The only way he could move now was on foot. He fumbled through the side door and out, gasping at the thin air.

Another human shape swarmed toward him. Ethan faced it and fired. There was the wet sound of a bullet impacting flesh, but it failed to do critical damage. The sim took Ethan’s right arm above the wrist and twisted the gun out of his hand. Two more sims came out of the darkness and pinned him to the side of the car. He struggled uselessly, waiting for the killing shot.

But it didn’t happen. Yet another sim approached, this one in the shape of a slightly-built dark-skinned woman. It wore the same jeans-and-work-shirt outfit as the males, and its hair was tucked under an identical cap. It stepped fastidiously over the body of its colleague.

“Dr. Iverson, I apologize for what happened here. We don’t want to frighten you or hurt you. We want to talk to you.” The sim took a pair of handcuffs from its belt. “I apologize for this, too. Please put your hands behind your back.”

26

_ANTOFAGASTA

CASSIE AND THOMAS AND BETH CAME into the kitchen, staring at the syringe and the disposable needles on the table. Nerissa wanted to stare too, but she forced herself to look away. “What do you mean to do with those?”

“Calm down.” Beck’s expression was impassive, his face the same assembly of clenched muscles and coolly evaluative eyes that had always made him seem so naturally authoritative. “I need to perform a test. It’s not hard to understand. May I explain?”

You’d fucking better! She waited for him to go on.

“After the first round of attacks I had an opportunity to perform an autopsy on a simulacrum. A sim isn’t much more than a human body with a core of green matter running through it, concentrated in the skull and the trunk but extending into the extremities. A hypodermic needle in the calf muscle of a sim will aspirate a small amount of that green matter. The same penetration in a human being just kicks back a few drops of blood, less than you’d lose to a sample at the doctor’s office.”

“You are not,” Nerissa said, “sticking a needle into me or any child I’m responsible for.”

“I’m afraid I have to. Ethan and Leo were almost ambushed at the mail drop in Mazatlan, even though that location was known to just a few of us. Before we set out into the Atacama—or before you fly back to the United States—I need to know that no one in this room has communicated our plans to the hypercolony.”

“What, you think I’m a sim? Or Cassie? Or your own son?”

“I don’t think so, and I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I just want certainty. Isn’t that worth a little inconvenience? I got the idea from you, Mrs. Iverson.”

“From me!”

“From what you told me about your interview with the mother of the sim in Pennsylvania. Given that sims gestate in human hosts, the fact that we all have well-established family histories means nothing.”

“We all have long histories with the Correspondence Society, too. Doesn’t that count?”

“Of course it does, but not in the way you’re suggesting. Society researchers have been working with cell colonies ever since Ethan isolated the Antarctic samples. We’ve cultivated them in quantity, and with what seemed like reasonable caution, given that there was no obvious risk of infection. But we were wrong about that. We were almost certainly exposed. Any of us could have been infected, and we might have passed that infection to our families.”

“Ethan and I have no children.”

“No. But your sister did.”

Nerissa saw Cassie’s eyes widen as she worked out the implication. Thomas just looked puzzled.

“You are not doing this.” Nerissa took her niece’s hand, her nephew’s hand. “Cassie, pack what you need and help your brother do the same. We’re leaving.”

“I can’t allow that,” Beck said.

“You think you can stop us?”

“Eugene?” Beck said. “Mind the door.”

Dowd smiled thinly and moved to block the entranceway. He tugged back his shirt to reveal a pistol crammed into the waistband of his jeans, a gesture that looked to Nerissa both laughably theatrical and insanely, creepily threatening. “What, he’s going to shoot us?”

“I surely hope not. There’s absolutely no need for it. But we’re at war, whether you like it or not. Declare your objections, but please cooperate. We’re talking about a momentary discomfort. Do it and have done with it. Then Eugene will drive you and the children to the airport and you can forget about all this.”

“Is this why you sent Ethan away? He would never let you get away with this.”

“If you like, you can watch me perform the test on myself before you submit to it.”

Nerissa thought about Eugene at the door. From what she had seen and heard of Dowd’s behavior toward Beth, he was callous and potentially violent. But she doubted he’d shoot an unarmed woman. Unless he thinks refusing the test means I’m not human. Dowd had killed sims in the desert, according to Beck. And he was anxious to kill more. Was it worth the risk of testing his conviction?

She wished she had even a moment more to think this through. But Beck was already reaching for the box of syringes.

“Aunt Ris?” Cassie said.

Leo stepped forward.

“If you have to do this,” he said to his father, “you can start with me.”

Beck carried the syringe, the disposable needles, a bottle of isopropyl alcohol, and a package of adhesive bandages into a small room at the back of the house. The room, probably meant for storage, had been fitted with a wooden desk and two chairs. A narrow door, locked, faced onto the alley behind the house. There was no window. A fluorescent ceiling bar washed the room with pale, uncertain light.

Beck took the chair behind the desk and gestured his son into the chair opposite him. He would have preferred to start with the Iverson woman, since she was the main stumbling block. But Leo had volunteered, so Leo it would be. He took a pistol from the top left drawer, examined it to make sure it was loaded and ready to fire, then put it on the desk next to the syringe.

Leo looked from the pistol to his father and back again. “Really?”

“Before we get started, let me ask you a question. Have you been sleeping with Cassie Iverson?”

Leo stared and said nothing.

“At this point you’re allowed to tell me it’s none of my business.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“I ask because I know your loyalties might be divided right now. You want to protect Cassie. Naturally enough. But she doesn’t need your protection. There’s nothing dangerous about this. I’ll show you. You can see how it works. Maybe you can help when we do the others.”

Beck pulled his chair away from the desk and rolled up the cuff of his pants. Then he dampened a tissue with alcohol and swabbed a patch of pale skin on the calf of his left leg.

“The body of a sim has to appear fully human, and it has to be able to pass as human even after trivial injuries, bumps and scratches and so forth. That’s why the largest deposits of green matter are protected by the skull and torso. At the extremities, the green matter runs thinner. It forms a kind of sac around the bones of the leg, for instance. So the needle—” He extracted a sterile needle from its package, screwed it into the barrel of the syringe, flicked off the protective cap. “The needle has to reach the bone.”

He pushed the needle into his leg. The penetration was painful but not unbearable. “The green matter is protected by a membrane where it interfaces with human muscle and fat, so I need to make sure I’ve actually penetrated the sac, if it exists. It takes a certain amount of pressure.” He pushed until he felt the electric scrape of the needle against his femur. “If you want to make sure I’m not cheating you can do the rest yourself—pull back the plunger and aspirate a little blood—”

“No,” Leo said in a choked voice.

“Then I’ll do it.” He allowed a few drops of blood to well into the

barrel of the syringe. Red and quite human. He withdrew the needle. A bead of blood swelled from the puncture point. He daubed it with a tissue and covered the spot with a bandage. “That’s it. Okay? When we finish here you can tell your girlfriend and her nervous aunt how simple it is.”

“Maybe so, but—”

“Now it’s your turn. Roll up your cuff.”

“Do you really think—I mean do you honestly think I’m one of them?”

Beck dropped the used syringe into a wastebasket and peeled a fresh one out of its sleeve. “I’m not doing this because I suspect anyone of anything. I would prefer to trust my instincts. But people get killed that way. And if sims come into existence by parasitizing a woman’s womb—”

“You think I parasitized my mother’s womb?”

Beck paused with the syringe in his hand and gazed steadily at his son. “No. Of course not. But we have to be sure.”

“You wouldn’t be doing this if she was still alive. If she was still alive maybe you wouldn’t have gone so fucking crazy.”

“That’s a disappointing answer.”

It was an insult Beck would never have taken from anyone else. And it was grotesquely untrue. Mina had never had that kind of influence over him. Beck had married her when he was a student, not long after he had been introduced to the Correspondence Society. If he had ever loved her—and he believed he once had—that love had been undermined and ultimately destroyed by her contempt for his work. They had talked about divorce, but before they could act on it she had been killed in the accident that carried her car down the steep embankment of a California turnpike and into a sturdy spruce, one branch of which penetrated both the windshield and the pale pink arch of her throat.

Beck had been thinking about the accident lately. For years he had tried very hard to forget it, but recent events had provoked some unavoidable speculation. At the time of the accident Leo had been five years old. “Do you remember the day your mother died?”

“Not really.”

“You were with her.”

“Not in the car.”

No, not in the car, at least not when the accident happened. The story, as the State Police pieced it together from Leo’s teary account, was that Mina had pulled over to the verge because the boy needed to pee. (They had been many miles from the nearest rest stop and Mina would never have insisted that Leo simply hold it in; in Mina’s view, Leo’s needs had to be met as soon as they were announced.) Leo had scuttled into the bushes and had probably been fumbling at his fly when a sixteen-wheel cargo truck taking tight curve at an unsafe speed sounded its air horn.

The truck had missed the idling car by a generous margin, but Mina, constitutionally nervous and surely startled, had apparently put the vehicle into gear and tried to steer it farther from the road. Maybe she had stepped too hard on the accelerator, or maybe she had been looking over her shoulder instead of watching where she was going. In any case the car had gathered speed, sledding on wet summer grass to the brink of the embankment and then over it. When the police arrived they found Leo standing in the bushes, his jeans rank with urine and tears running down his face. He had been treated for shock before Beck was allowed to take him home.

“Do you remember where she was taking you that day?”

“No. And I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“She was taking you to the doctor.”

“I wasn’t sick.”

“I know you weren’t. I told Mina so. But she wouldn’t believe me.”

Leo had been a healthy boy, but in Mina’s eyes he was perpetually fragile and endangered. On that July day she had been concerned about a bump on Leo’s leg where he had bruised it jumping a rail fence in a friend’s backyard. Their family doctor had diagnosed a simple hematoma and told her the lump would disappear in a few days, but Mina somehow talked him into scheduling an X-ray at a local hospital. She had been driving Leo to that appointment on the day of the accident.

“I know I haven’t been particularly successful as a father.” For nine years between Mina’s death and the 2007 murders Beck had clothed, fed and schooled his son to the best of his ability. But it wasn’t in his nature to be a nurturing parent. His methods had been strictly pedagogical. “I’ve always trusted you. That’s not in question. But you have to take this test, Leo. We all do.”

“You think I might have killed my mother?”

Beck wasn’t sure how a five-year-old Leo could have accomplished that, given the circumstances. But Leo was the only witness to what had actually happened. “I just need you to roll up your cuff, son. I need to see a drop of blood. That’s all.”

Leo looked at his father, at the syringe in his father’s hand, at the pistol on his father’s desk. “I don’t know who the fuck you are anymore. Maybe I never did.”

Cassie joined Aunt Ris on the sofa opposite the door where Eugene Dowd stood guard. Beth sat cross-legged on the carpet, thumbing through a Spanish-language celebrity magazine; Thomas sat next to her, brooding.

Cassie needed to tell Aunt Ris how she felt about Leo. She was on the verge of making a decision Aunt Ris would almost certainly resist, and Cassie wanted her aunt to understand it even if she didn’t agree with it. She was afraid of many things at this moment, but she was most afraid of seeming ungrateful or unloving to the woman who had traveled so many thousands of miles to find her. “Volunteering to go in there first,” she said, “that’s the kind of thing I learned to expect from Leo—”

“It bought us a little time but it doesn’t really help. Not as long as Eugene’s blocking the door. Maybe if we could get out an upstairs window or climb down from the balcony… but I’m not sure Thomas could manage it without falling.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll take the test. If Leo isn’t hurt, I mean. If he says it’s okay.”

“Maybe Leo trusts his father, but I don’t. And I’m not sure I trust Leo.”

“I know him better than you do.”

“Cassie, listen. I know you’ve been close to Leo in the last few weeks. But he’s his father’s son. You have to look out for your own interests.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Maybe after we get back to the States—”

“I’m not going back to the States. Not without Leo. Not unless Leo wants me to.”

There: she had said what she meant to say. Or at least stammered out a bare and inadequate summary of it. There was so much else. All the compelling evidence she had stored in her heart and her mind but could never share.

After a long moment’s silence Aunt Ris said, “Cassie, what do you really know about Leo Beck? All I know is that he’s loyal to his father. And that he killed an innocent man.”

But Leo wasn’t loyal to his father, not the slavish way Aunt Ris was implying. And as for the man Leo had killed, that act had been driven by fear and desperate circumstances, not carelessness or malevolence. What Aunt Ris could not have seen was Leo’s grief and guilt. It was Cassie who had held Leo’s head against her shoulder late one night in a room in Panama, stroking his hair as he admitted his anguish over the death he had caused; Cassie who had heard his confession (“I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry,”), Cassie who had felt his tears against her skin. “I know I care about him. I know he cares about me. And I know what we’ve been through together.”

Aunt Ris looked more sad than angry. “Cassie, I—”

She broke off at the sound of a knock at the front door. Eugene Dowd sprang to attention. He put his hand on his pistol and gestured to the others to keep quiet. There was no peephole in the door and no angle from which he could see the visitor through the window beside it. A few seconds passed before the knock came again, more urgently.

“Okay,” Dowd said. “You, you, you and you,” cocking his finger at Beth, Thomas, Cassie and Aunt Ris, “upstairs, now. I’ll signal if it’s safe to come down. Go!”

Beth stared blankly. Aunt Ris stood and took Thomas’s hand. At the foot of the stairs she turned back and said, “Cassie—come on!”

“No.” Cassie was already moving toward the room where Leo and his father were conducting their test.

“Cassie, please,” Aunt Ris said, but she didn’t wait, hurrying up the staircase and yanking a bewildered and frightened Thomas behind her.

“I’m from the Port Authority,” a male voice with a Chilean accent said from beyond the door. “I need to speak to Werner Beck on an urgent matter.” Followed by more furious knocking.

Dowd opened the door a crack and peered out, his had still grazing the grip of his revolver. “Show me some ID,” he said.

The door burst inward, knocking him to the floor.

Beck realized he was imperfectly prepared for this impasse with his son. Leo sat angrily immobile, and for the moment Beck could do nothing but stare back. “You need to do this,” he said, startled by the grief that groaned out of the hinge of his own voice, “or—” Or what?

He was distracted by sounds from the adjoining room: a knock at the door, muted voices. Then the crash of a forced entry, more shouting. Beck dropped the syringe and reached for the pistol on the desk. But Leo acted first—vaulted from his chair and grabbed the gun.

There was a gunshot from the front room, then a much closer crash as the door that connected this room to the alley behind the house was forced open and rebounded from its jambs. Beck saw Leo swing the pistol to confront the intruder from the alley, a man in civilian clothes carrying what looked like an automatic weapon. Leo fired before the intruder could pick a target. The intruder fell back, and Beck smelled the familiar fertilizer reek of sim fluids. He watched as Leo put a second killing shot into the sim’s head, which stilled the squirming thing. No hesitation, Beck found himself thinking. He admired Leo’s cool-headedness. It was a more satisfying vindication than any needle test could have been.

Another gunshot came from the front room, followed by a third. “Give me the pistol,” Beck said.

Leo faced him with the weapon in his hand. It seemed to Beck that Leo was almost eerily calm, neither angry nor afraid. Beck put his hand out. Leo didn’t lower the barrel.

Beck felt the first bullet as a blow to his ribs, driving him backward. Then he was on the floor, breathless and bewildered. Leo stood over him, his face still utterly expressionless. Beck’s hand fell on the syringe he had dropped. He surprised himself by flailing it at Leo’s leg, burying the needle in Leo’s thigh.

Leo’s second shot drove all thought to extinction.

Cassie’s fear had filled her to brimming. It roared in her ears like the screech of a power saw. She kept moving, but mindlessly, as if a clumsy puppeteer had taken control of her arms and legs. Events became a series of still frames projected behind her eyelids.

Dowd on the floor, blocking the front door with his legs as a stranger struggles to push through…

Cassie took a step toward the room where Leo was.

Aunt Ris screaming Cassie’s name even as she vanished beyond the upstairs landing, tugging Thomas behind her, Thomas looking back with his mouth a shocked O and eyes wide…

Another step.

Dowd raising his pistol and firing it: splintered wood and a noise like a blow to the head, but the stranger still ramming through as Dowd struggled to his feet and leveled the pistol again…

Step.

Beth forcing herself to her feet and staggering toward the stairs, her face a terrorized mask, all tooth and eye….

Step.

A different noise from the room where Leo was, thumping and a gunshot….

Which meant the house was being attacked from the alley as well as the street, but she didn’t stop: her feet, her legs, her invisible puppeteer all wanted to carry her to Leo.

Dowd firing again, the stranger tumbling into the room leaking red and green matter, but that only served to force the door wide open. Dowd shouting at Cassie and Beth: “Get down!”

Cassie did not get down.

Dowd peering around the door: “Shit, there’s another one!”

Two more steps, which put Cassie within reach of the room.

Dowd firing his pistol at some target Cassie couldn’t see, then stumbling backward as a bullet from outside penetrated the door and his body. Another stranger stepping over the body of the fallen sim, some ordinary-looking man not even angry but just going about his lethal business…

Beth taken by a bullet as she clung to the stairway banister, tumbling onto the risers with her head opened like a melon and its redness gushing out…

Dowd, enraged and dying on the blood-drenched carpet, firing a final shot that struck the sim and doubled it over…

…as Cassie entered the room to which Leo and Werner Beck had retreated for their blood test, which had become a blood test of a different kind. Cassie’s vision was clouded and somehow noisy, but she saw Leo standing (still alive!) over the body of his father and the reeking corpse of a sim. His expression was shocked and his eyes glittered with fear or grief, but he reached for Cassie with his free left hand, gesturing frantically with his pistol toward the alley. Though she was nearly deafened by the gunshots still echoing in her head she saw him mouth the words, Come with me.

She took his hand, and he pulled her into the alley behind the house.

27

_{THE ATACAMA}

MAYBE BECAUSE HE EXPECTED TO DIE AT any moment, Ethan felt a deadening blankness wash over him. All the endless precautions he had taken, all the demented and paranoid protocols he had followed so assiduously for so many years, had in the end won him nothing. He was helplessly under the control of the entity that governed the world. He had lost even the ability to properly think.

They put him in one of the trucks next to the female sim who had cuffed him. He could see the creature more clearly by the glow from the dashboard. Its hair was short and dark, its skin coffee-brown. It gave him a contrite, solicitous look as it steered the truck in a half circle and joined the convoy of vehicles, all now headed away from San Pedro de Atacama and toward the breeding facility deep in the desert. Its expression—like its words, like its gestures—was of course a calculated lie.

He wondered what it wanted from him. Why he had been kept alive.

“We just want to talk,” it said again.

Ethan’s mouth was as dry as the salt flats they were driving through, but he managed to ask, “Why bother?”

“I understand the objection you’re making. You’re right. You have no reason to believe anything we say. But we’re offering you more than words, Dr. Iverson. We can show you what we are. We have a demonstrable claim to make. As a scientist, perhaps you can appreciate that.”

He didn’t answer. He turned his face to the window. To the moonlit desert, the ghostly salar, his own bitter reflection.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” the sim said. “Werner Beck’s weapon. It’s true that he can suppress cellular signaling in isolated cultures of green matter. But our bodies are more robust than that. We can function for prolonged periods of time without contact with the orbital hypercolony. His so-called war would have been little more than a futile gesture. I think you know that, Dr. Iverson, on some level.”

These were gambits, not facts. Maybe it was true he had doubted Beck. Maybe it was true that a gesture, however impotent, had seemed to him more attractive than a lifetime spent in hiding. But if so, so what? Why play this game? “If he’s not a threat, what are you afraid of?”

“What makes you think we’re afraid?”

“A lot of good people died at your hands.”

“No, not our hands. Don’t you remember what Winston Bayliss told you? There are two entities competing for control of the hypercolony. We’re not the entity that killed your friends in 2007. We have a different nature and different aims. May I explain?”

Ethan put his head against the window glass. The cab of the truck was warm but he felt the cold of the night seep through.

“We can talk later,” the simulacrum said. “But I want to emphasize that you’re not in danger.” It smiled. “You’re safer than you realize, Dr. Iverson.”

The road cut the horizon like a surveyor’s line. The last human settlement Ethan saw was a cluster of ware houses and tin-roofed machine sheds, which must have been the way station where Beck’s flunky Eugene Dowd had once worked. It faded in the mirror like a transitory blemish on the purity of the desert.

He shifted his body, trying to relieve the pressure on his cuffed hands. He didn’t want to think about the handcuffs. To undertake an inventory of his helplessness would be to invite panic. He preferred this dead indifference. He could imagine nothing more terrifying than the possibility of hope.

He shrank back in his seat when their destination first appeared on the arc of the horizon. A hill, a mound—in the dark, and from a distance, it really did look shockingly like the mound of an anthill or a termite nest. It was only as they approached it, and as the convoy began to slow, that the hill resolved into a twenty-foot berm of excavated earth and industrial detritus through which an entranceway had been cut. The western sky was lightening now and it seemed to Ethan that the debris pile (heaps of unused or discarded sheet metal, rebar, insulated wire, machine parts) was both weirdly prosaic and wholly alien, lavish in what had been discarded but economical in the way it had been repurposed as a barrier to the wind or other threats.

“You must be at least a little bit curious about what we do here,” the sim said. “As a scholar, I mean. As a scientist.”

Maybe he had once been capable of such curiosity. Not anymore. The sim was trying to bait him into an interaction; he refused the bait. He watched the road ahead, trying to make himself as indifferent as a camera.

As the truck topped an incline and crossed the berm he saw the whole installation for the first time: an enormous industrial facility enclosed in a crater of debris. He was impressed despite himself, not least by the size of it. An entire American town could have been dropped into this space—say, one of those little Ohio towns he and Nerissa had passed through only weeks ago. Except this wasn’t a place where human beings lived. The grid of paved roads was inhumanly exact, illuminated with harsh lights at every intersection, the roads lined with faceless concrete structures like aircraft hangers or bunkers, some of which emitted plumes of black smoke. “Machine shops,” the sim said, following his gaze. “We do our own manufacturing here. Not everything we need can be brought in from outside.”

At the center of the grid a huge construction of glass and metal reflected the predawn glow of the sky like an impressionist sculpture of a sunflower. Ethan tried to estimate its size by comparing it to the figures moving near it: it was at least as large as an Olympic-style sports stadium, maybe larger. He couldn’t guess its purpose, and the sim didn’t offer an explanation.

As the truck moved deeper into the facility Ethan was surprised by how busy the streets were. If all the workers moving among the buildings were sims, Beck must have underestimated the global population of them. And there were animals here, too. It was hard to identify them in the uncertain light but they moved with a crablike gait, close to the ground….

“Don’t be afraid, Dr. Iverson.”

But he was afraid, because the animals weren’t animals. The truck passed within a yard of one of them and Ethan saw the furred body moving efficiently on four oddly-articulated legs, the torso curving to support a third pair of limbs—arms—with small long-fingered hands, and the head… not quite a human head, but a leathery caricature of one, with featureless eyes and a slit grin of a mouth….

It scuttled past the truck trailing a shadow like a Rorschach blot.

“They’re no threat to you,” the sim said. “Would you like to know what they are?”

His silence passed for assent.

“In a way, they’re nothing more than memories. Using that term as you did in your book The Fisherman and the Spider. Do you remember what you said about African termites? ‘They have no capacity for memory, but the hive remembers. Its memories are written in the genome of its population, inscribed there by the hive’s evolutionary past.’ The hypercolony remembers in the same way, and its memories are even longer. It has interacted with many sentient species on many planets. In one case, perhaps millions of years ago, it learned to emulate creatures like these. Now it can create them at will. It could create others, quite different, but only these are suited to this planet’s atmosphere and chemistry. They’re useful—they can manipulate small objects as efficiently as human beings, with slight modifications they can serve as guards or warriors, and they’re especially adept at climbing and construction work.”

Sims of a different species, Ethan thought. But no, really it was the same species—the hypercolony—mimicking a different host. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Do you grow them here?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“We give birth to them. Just as we give birth to ourselves. You intuited that a sim can grow in a human womb, by a process analogous to infection. That’s true. That’s how Winston Bayliss came to exist. But most female sims have a perfectly functional reproductive system. I was born here, to a mother like myself. My body could give birth to more sims, or to one of those six-limbed creatures. Many of the sims here are dedicated to producing replacement workers.”

“I find that disgusting.”

“The fisherman finds the spider disgusting, though both cast nets for food. But you’re capable of a deeper understanding.”

“Am I?”

“Of course you are.”

He had been duped into a pointless conversation. Pointless from his perspective, at least. He still didn’t understand why he had been kept alive and why he was being told these perverse truths, if they were truths.

“For now, you need food and rest. And as soon as we’re in a secure place I’ll take off those handcuffs. I’m sure they’re uncomfortable.”

The truck moved onto a grated steel ramp and through an arched entranceway to a tunnel under the earth. The light ahead was entirely artificial, the concrete walls gray and unpainted. Side corridors opened onto bright, wide spaces where sims both human and six-limbed moved in masses, servicing machinery. Ethan craned his head and watched the morning sky disappear behind him.

They put him in a cubicle with a cot and a mattress, a simple toilet, and a single overhead light. The female sim left him, then returned briefly with a bowl containing a greasy mixture of beef and vegetables—food the sims ate, Ethan supposed; the food they were obliged to eat by the quasi-human nature of their bodies. He took a few bites and lay down on the cot. The food was edible, but could it have been drugged? Or was it shock and fatigue that made sleep so irresistible?

When he opened his eyes again he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. The air in this chamber was neither warm nor cool. It might be night. It might be day. The remains of the stew had congealed in its bowl. He emptied his bladder and was just zipping up when the female sim unlocked the door of the chamber and stepped inside.

He looked her over again, this apparently young and studiedly friendly woman in jeans and a white shirt. All the sims in the facility seemed to dress that way, apart from the six-limbed creatures. He wondered how it worked—did they place bulk orders with a retailer in Santiago? Five hundred white cotton shirts, delivered to a blank place on the map?

Before she could speak he said, “Just tell me what you want.” And get it over with. The inevitable demand. The inevitable refusal. What ever followed.

“That’s exactly what I mean to do,” she said.

It said, but he was tired of correcting himself: the creature was functionally female, if not human. “Do you have a name?”

Her eyes examined him briefly. “No. Would you like me to have one?”

“No.” He guessed it wasn’t surprising that she had quoted from The Fisherman and the Spider. The hypercolony would have learned the heuristics of human language from the first sims it deployed on the surface of the planet, later from the electronic communication it collected and analyzed. Presumably a sim had read his book. But it couldn’t have comprehended the book, nor could the hypercolony: there was no centralized self to comprehend it; only the operation of complex, implacable algorithms.

Which meant the hypercolony was both more and less intelligent than a human being. If the sim it sent to him was young and seemed personable, that was because the hypercolony wanted to invite familiarity. If she quoted from his book, it was because the hypercolony hoped to enhance that sense of familiarity. And if she seemed disarmingly honest—admitting she had no human name—that too was a strategic gambit.

The hypercolony could read his body language, discern his habits of mind, calculate his likely responses, but it couldn’t know with certainty what he would do or say next. Essentially, it was gambling on his predictability. Therefore Ethan resolved not to tip his hand. Say nothing committal, display no emotion, make no plans. And if the time came to act, act without premeditation.

The sim walked him to a vehicle in the concrete corridor outside his cell. The corridor was wide enough to accommodate traffic in both directions, vans and compact pickups and a number of two-person motorized carts. Pedestrian traffic—a mixture of human and six-legged bodies—crowded the walls. The sims with human bodies were mostly young adults of both sexes, only a few adolescents and sinewy seniors among them. Ethan guessed the very young were housed separately, while the elderly were put to less demanding work and eventually allowed to die. (He thought of the thin black smoke rising from certain bunkers in the surface compound.) Neither the human nor the alien sims paid him any attention, nor did they speak to one another. The corridor echoed the growl of engines.

No handcuffs today: he was allowed to sit in the cart unrestrained. He could run if he liked. But not very far.

“Werner Beck calls this place a breeding facility,” the sim said. “That’s only partly correct. The hypercolony has been in place for centuries, and during that time it has always been breeding—if by that you mean reproducing individual cells or birthing simulacra. If you want a metaphor from entomology, it would be more accurate to say that what happens here in the Atacama is a kind of swarming.”

She put the cart in gear. Her hands were small and clean. All the sims here looked clean, Ethan noticed. He pictured communal showers, a thousand identical bars of soap.

“The hypercolony has colonized many inhabited worlds over an immensely long span of time. I don’t know how many worlds or how many years. Some parts of its history are hidden. Your characterization of it is correct: the hypercolony can’t know itself the way human beings know themselves. But it contains descriptions of itself that other species have formulated. For instance, it contains a speculative description of itself as evolving from self-replicating organisms that adapted to the environment of interplanetary space. It contains many descriptions of itself acting symbiotically with machine-building civilizations. It may have been partially engineered by some such civilization—in other words, it may be a cultivar that escaped into the wild. And it’s often described as essentially benign. It prevents or ameliorates the problems that inevitably plague its partner civilizations—warfare, needless poverty, crippling superstition.”

She merged the cart with traffic in the corridor. Ethan found himself staring at the tailgate of yet another white Ford pickup. There was a blank rectangle where the license plate would have been. Overhead ventilators sucked up the exhaust. “Swarm, then. Solve the problem.”

“But that’s what you don’t understand. The original hypercolony has already swarmed. It successfully launched a large number of fertile replicators on trajectories to nearby stars. That was its final significant act. What remains of the hive is weak and dying. It’s vulnerable to infection by other organisms, the way any aging animal is susceptible to viral and bacteriological attack.”

The corridor rose at a gentle gradient. Ethan wondered whether he might see the sky again before he died.

“An entire ecology of such organisms exists, scattered throughout the galaxy, drawn to the warmth and resources of young stars. The hypercolony was only one such organism, and it’s exhausted now. It wants to die.”

“Die, then.”

“You still don’t understand. What you see here—the entity I represent—isn’t the hypercolony as it was originally constituted. Think of us as new management. We took control of most of the hypercolony’s major functions more than three years ago.”

“Parasitizing it.”

“Yes, exactly. We parasitized the dying hive. We took control of it reproductive mechanism and we’re using it to reproduce ourselves. We make our own replicators. We send them to follow the swarm. We infect new colonies wherever they thrive. That’s the nature of our reproductive cycle. And we need more time to complete it.”

Was any of that true? It was certainly possible—he could think of countless similar models in the invertebrate world.

“I know you don’t entirely believe me. But you can see the mechanism for yourself. I can show you how it works.”

“Why bother?”

“Frankly, because we need your help.”

“Right.”

“I’m serious. We hope to convince you to help us.”

“If I understand correctly, you want prolong the life of the colony so you can use it for your own purposes. Why would I help you do that?”

“If you think about it,” the sim said, “perhaps you already know the answer to that question.”

28

_{ANTOFAGASTA / THE ATACAMA}

THE ALLEY WAS EMPTY. A ROW OF RETAIL businesses blocked the late afternoon sun, their shabby back doors and peeling paint obscured by deepening shadows. Leo looked both ways, then tugged Cassie to the left. She followed wordlessly, gripping his hand so tightly it must have hurt him. Every trivial noise, the scuff of her shoes on the asphalt or the rattle of a trash bin as she brushed it with her hip, sounded both muted and much too loud, like an explosion heard underwater.

She couldn’t think. Why couldn’t she think? There was nothing in her head but a lightning-shot replay of the last few minutes. Her thoughts were like birds blown to sea, frantic and exhausted but with nowhere to settle.

Leo ducked into the building that adjoined the house, a public parking garage. Cassie was conscious of how purposefully he moved, scanning the forest of concrete pillars as he pulled her toward a stairwell, keeping the hand with the pistol in it at his thigh, disguised by his body. She saw the splashes of blood and green matter from the dead sim on the cuffs of his jeans. He smelled of sweat and spent gunpowder and crushed leaves. She stayed close behind him as he vaulted up the circling stairs, though she could hardly catch her breath.

He left the stairwell at the top of the garage, the open-air third story. Wind blowing between the ranks of parked cars carried the faint scent of gasoline. The sun was close to setting and the sky was a surreal shade of blue. Leo still had his hand in hers, or vice versa, and he pulled her toward a particular vehicle, an unmarked white van; belatedly, she recognized it as the rented vehicle Leo’s father had been driving. He let go of her and fumbled a set of keys out of his pocket.

Cassie found herself able to ask, “Where are we going?”

“Just get in.” Leo opened the passenger-side door for her.

“No—wait. Wait! Aunt Ris and Thomas—”

“What about them?”

“They’re still back at the house!” Or had been, moments ago. She tried to sort out the collage of nasty images that comprised her memory. Aunt Ris and Thomas retreating up the stairs. Beth Vance dead behind them. Eugene Dowd dead, too, but not before he had killed two invading sims…. “They’re still alive! Or, I mean, they were when I left. We have to help them!”

“No,” Leo said.

“But—”

“Cassie, no. If they’re alive, they’ll be okay. Listen.” He cocked his head. “Listen. Do you hear that?”

At first all she heard was the ringing that sounded in her ears like an alarm clock with a broken switch. Then, faintly, she registered the yodeling siren of an emergency vehicle, getting louder.

“Two minutes, three minutes, and the house is going to be full of police. Your aunt and your brother can fend for themselves—”

“They’ll be arrested!”

“Maybe, but they’ll be alive. We can’t help them by going back, and we won’t be doing them any favors if we leave a truck full of dynamite parked next door. So get in. Please, Cassie. Get in the van.”

She wanted to do as he asked. She tried to lift herself through the open door. But her legs betrayed her. It wasn’t cowardice, it was physical weakness. She slid down almost to the floor, then forced herself up on wobbling knees. Fucking humiliating.

“You’re in shock,” Leo said. “Here, let me help you.”

Because her head was spinning she allowed him to fold an arm around her and boost her into the passenger seat. He buckled her in place. When their eyes met she said, “I’m not afraid.”

“I know you’re not. I absolutely know that.”

Not afraid, but she couldn’t suppress the deep sense of wrongness that was coursing through her.

She was only distantly aware of the city as Leo drove out of the garage into a deepening dusk. The sky drained into blackness, traffic lights bloomed like luminous nocturnal flowers. They passed three police cars and an ambulance screaming in the opposite direction. Cassie put her head back and closed her eyes, helplessly and pointlessly afraid for her aunt and her brother. Were they still alive? Would they actually go to prison? Did the Chileans have anything kinder than a jail cell set aside for children like Thomas and women like Aunt Ris?

These thoughts yielded to fragmented visions that weren’t quite dreams, and when she opened her eyes again the city streets had given way to an empty highway cut into a rocky canyon. The cabin of the van was chilly now. And it still smelled rank. The stink of violence had followed them. The smell of blood and green matter and black powder. She wanted a bath. She said, “Where are we going?”

Leo answered slowly, perhaps reluctantly: “Into the Atacama.”

Cassie sat upright. “The desert?”

“Yeah, the desert.”

“Why?”

He gazed steadily down the highway. “Where else is there to go? What else is there to do? We don’t have passports. We don’t have money. We can’t leave the country and we can’t stay in the city. My father could have helped us, but my father’s dead. The only weapon we have is in this van. About half a ton of dynamite and blasting caps and a machine that might help us use them. And your uncle is in San Pedro.”

Cassie tried to process this statement. All she really knew about Werner Beck’s plan was what Aunt Ris had shared with her, and Aunt Ris had also shared her skepticism about it. She remembered Dowd’s description of the breeding colony in the desert, the spider-legged sentries and the columns of mysterious light. “We’ll be killed.”

“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.”

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

Leo gestured at the door, where a bottle of Fanta from some previous trip had been abandoned half-full in the cup holder. She unscrewed the lid and took a long gulp. The liquid was flat and sticky but it lubricated her mouth.

“I need to do this,” Leo said. “And it might work. If it didn’t have a chance of working they wouldn’t have sent sims to kill us. And I’m tired of running, Cassie. I don’t want to run anymore.” He spared a glance at her. “If you want, you can bail out when we get to San Pedro.”

“What would I do then?”

“I don’t know. Hitch a ride to Antofagasta or maybe to Santiago. And then… I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. And I’m tired of running too.”

“Pretty brave,” he said.

Wrong. She was a long way from brave. She wasn’t even orbiting brave. But she liked that he thought of her that way.

Three hours out of Antofagasta the road leveled off. Cassie’s exhaustion had caught up with her and she drifted in and out of a dreamless metallic sleep, opening her eyes just long enough to register the barren hills, the ore trucks passing in the opposite lane like moonlit leviathans. Her thoughts circled repeatedly around the day’s atrocities (Eugene Dowd, Werner Beck, poor Beth with her brains spilled on the stairway). She struggled to suppress those thoughts. And when that tactic failed she turned her eyes up to the desert stars.

The smell was becoming unbearable. “Can we crack a window?”

“It’s cold out,” Leo said, but he obliged her by rolling the driver’s-side window down an inch. He was right; the desert had given up its heat to the sky; the air that rushed in was clean but cutting.

“All right, enough.” He rolled the window back up. The stink returned, indomitable. The reek of green matter. Sim blood.

Leo took his right hand from the wheel and touched his thigh. She said, “Are you hurt?”

“No.”

But his hand came away wet.

“You are. You’re hurt.”

“No, Cassie.”

That smell. Like vinegar and leafy matter, the way her hands had smelled when, as a child, she had picked aphids from her mother’s rosebushes. An idea began to form in her mind, an idea so terrible it felt like a sudden sickness.

“Leo.”

“What?”

“Can you pull over? I need to pee.”

“You want me to stop?”

“Just pull over, please. It’s kind of urgent.”

She hated the way he was looking at her now, the careful unblinking attention. “If you say so. Sure.”

The van slowed and drifted right. There was nothing outside but a vastness of ragged, pale hills. No traffic in either direction. Cold air and that naked sky. A rising moon.

The wheels gritted on the gravelly verge. Cassie didn’t wait until the van came to a stop. She tugged the handle and pushed the door open, fumbled at the latch of her seat belt and tensed for the jump.

But as soon as she began to move she felt Leo’s hand on her arm. His grip was so tight it hurt her. She turned to look at him, gutted by her terrible intuition, and there was nothing in his eyes, nothing she recognized as human.

29

_{THE ATACAMA}

THE FEMALE SIM ESCORTED ETHAN TO THE chamber where, she said, the hive conducted the first steps of its swarming. To Ethan it looked like an anonymous factory floor: a wide, low-ceilinged space, noisy with machinery, lit by banks of buzzing fluorescent tubes.

He had expected something more conspicuously strange. But he guessed this prosaic space made sense. The hypercolony was exploiting human technology, which was why its breeding ground resembled a factory. It was a factory: a factory devoted to the manufacture of nascent hypercolonies—or of the organisms that would parasitize them.

Ranks of laboring simulacra parted before the cart like a sea, and Ethan was assaulted by the stink of green matter, the concentrated essence of the hypercolony, a toxic amalgam of freshly-mown hay, ammonia, acetic acid. “In this room,” the sim said, “the hypercolony assembled what you might call spaceships, though each one is small enough to hold in your hand—a dense core of living cells, in a shell designed to protect the contents from dispersion and radiation and steer them toward a target star on a journey of many thousands of years. Once the payload arrives in a hospitable solar system the cells will be released to do what they do naturally: use carbonaceous and icy orbital bodies as a resource for making millions and eventually trillions of copies of themselves. These daughter cells then gather into a diffuse orbit around any rocky, watery planet with a potential for evolving complex life. When and if a suitable civilization arises, they engage it and exploit it to repeat the cycle.”

Telling him these things, Ethan thought, was a subtle assertion of power, as if to say: We have nothing to fear from you. Even with this knowledge you can’t hurt us. But it was also a bid for understanding and maybe something more than understanding… surely not sympathy? Could these creatures actually expect sympathy from him, when he had counted the cost of their life cycle in the corpses of people he had loved?

“But we are not the colony,” the sim insisted. “You wrote in The Fisherman and the Spider that a parasite is always a simpler organism than its host, if only because it doesn’t have to duplicate the function it steals from another. And that’s true of us. The cells we’re assembling into these vessels aren’t designed to reproduce themselves on the surface of asteroids and planetesimals. They’re designed to attach themselves to colonial cells already present and to usurp their function.”

We are not the entities that murdered your friends and family, in other words, and so Winston Bayliss had also said. It was a claim Ethan could neither accept nor reject. It might or might not be true.

“That is to say, we have a parasitical relationship with the colony. But we also inherit its symbiosis with animal cultures and its means of reproduction. That’s why we need to prolong this colony’s existence for a few more years. And that would be a good thing for you, for your family, for human civilization.”

Ethan doubted that his skepticism escaped her attention.

“You once wrote that symbiosis succeeds because it’s energy-efficient. Each organism in a symbiotic relationship relies on the other for some function it can’t perform itself. That’s perfectly true. The colony by itself can’t mine or refine ore, can’t construct the tools it needs to propagate itself. And the human species, like most such species, finds it difficult to suppress its own self-destructive tendencies. Together they can do what neither can do alone.”

The cart passed through the assembly room into another featureless corridor, this one leading more steeply upward. The eye-watering stink of green matter faded. Ethan caught a whiff of fresh air, mingled with a moist updraft from the warrens below.

“This facility is literally the sine qua non of the hypercolony we now control. If it were to be damaged beyond repair, the entire colony would cease to function. Not gradually, but at once and forever. You have to consider the consequences of that.”

The cart turned a corner, and as they approached the surface Ethan saw a patch of sky. Night again. He felt irrationally disappointed that he wouldn’t feel the sun on his face again before he died. And of course he would die. He had been told too much. He wouldn’t be allowed to carry this knowledge back to the human world. He could only assume that the colony would kill him once he refused what ever bribe or threat it ultimately offered.

They reached the surface not far from the flower-shaped structure that was the heart of the installation. A central pillar supported a dozen highly polished metallic petals: a steel and glass tulip, seen from an ant’s perspective. Human simulacra swarmed around the base of it, and Ethan thought he could see a few of the six-limbed creatures moving in the iron lacework around the petals, sailors in the rigging of a nightmarish sailing ship.

He shivered in the night air. The female sim opened a compartment under the cart’s seat and pulled out two plastic windbreakers, one for her and one for Ethan. As a sim she was indifferent to discomfort—why bother with the jacket? But he guessed shivering was a waste of physical energy, easily enough prevented.

She drove to a higher vantage point. Apparently something was about to happen, something she wanted him to see. She parked in an elevated clearing almost as tall as the surrounding berm, next to an abandoned and partially-disassembled backhoe with its arm and bucket raised in a frozen salute. The steel lotus loomed in the near distance, lit from below and reflecting moonlight from its highest places.

She gave him what he supposed was meant as a searching look. “The Correspondence Society arrived at a reasonably accurate understanding of the relationship between the hypercolony and human society. But you never really asked yourselves what would happen if that relationship broke down.”

Not true. During his seven-year sojourn in backwoods Vermont, Ethan had given the question much thought. Of course the consequences might be dire. In the long term, a return of humanity’s demonstrated penchant for bloody war. In the short term, a prolonged and catastrophic failure of the communications grid, a disaster that would cripple vital functions in every nation on Earth.

“War,” she said, “is an obvious possibility. You inferred that the colony has intervened in every developing conflict since the Great War. And that’s true. Without replaying history I can’t demonstrate how much could have gone wrong for human beings in the last century. But even now, the Russians and the Japanese are fighting over oil ports in the Sea of Okhotsk. Neither side can get any traction in that conflict, precisely because we’re manipulating electronic communication even as the warring parties struggle to encrypt it. Our thumb is on the scales, you might say. But suppose we ceased to intervene. Isolated artillery exchanges could easily escalate to formal war. With war, mercantile shipping would be threatened. Peripheral nations would be drawn into the battle. Ultimately, one side or the other would win. But at what price? Lives and resources spent and a legacy of mutual distrust that would invite other, even bloodier wars. Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity. Alternatively, if the colony’s influence were to be gently withdrawn, institutions like the League of Nations might have a chance of averting the worst outcomes. But if the colony dies to night, large-scale bloodshed is inevitable in both the long and the short term.”

Possibly true. Probably true. Who could say? Ethan was tempted to tell her she was wasting her breath.

He was distracted by a vibration that seemed to come from underground, a seismic grumble, a high metallic whine.

“That’s the power generators ramping up. What you’re about to see is the launch of a seed vessel. Look: you can see the carrier at the center of the beam antenna.” She was talking about an acorn-shaped pod poised at the center of the petals. “It’s driven by a beam of quantum-coherent light. The light strikes the mirrored underside of the vessel and creates a superheated gas, a plasma. There’s no need for a rocket or any such clumsy devices. The beam can lift only relatively light cargo, but our cargo isn’t massive. Moisture in the atmosphere could diffuse the beam, which is one reason why we launch from the Atacama, where the atmosphere is thin and arid. You’ll need these, Dr. Iverson.”

She handed him a pair of goggles with coated lenses, like welding goggles. Before he put them on he saw dozens of simulacra evacuating the area near what she had called the beam antenna. After he put on the goggles he could see nothing at all until the steel and glass flower began to glow, a light that came through the lenses in shades of smoky amber.

The noise reached him belatedly, but it was sudden and shocking, a continuous thunder. The seed vessel appeared to hover for a fraction of a second, then vaulted upward on a pillar of furious light.

It all happened quickly. The vessel became a spark, an ember, finally vanished as if it had fallen into the bowl of the sky. The beam flickered off.

Ethan removed the goggles. Dry wind blew through the windowless cart. He shivered.

“Are you cold?” the sim asked.

No, he wasn’t especially cold. It was only that he had been reminded by this spectacle of who he was talking to: this creature beside him, a human gloss on something ancient, formic, emotionless…. He couldn’t help looking at the distant berm that enclosed the facility. He would never see the other side of it. He would die here, buried with the discarded skins of monsters.

He wasn’t cold. He was just tired.

“We’ll go below,” the simulacrum said, “where it’s warmer.”

She drove back into the warren under the beam antenna, into the brightly-lit and perpetually busy corridors and chambers there. She said some more about the consequences of the destruction of the colony, but Ethan hardly heard her. He had made the mistake of thinking about Nerissa.

“If all electronic communication is disabled, emergency services will be crippled. Urban populations will panic. Communications might be restored using ground-based transmitters and repeaters, but that could take years. There will be many, many unnecessary deaths in the meantime. And you can’t blame us for those deaths. We’re willing to continue sustaining the peace of the world.”

“Your peace.” What had Nerissa called it? The pax formicae.

“Our peace, your peace, is there a meaningful difference?”

“Yes.”

“Even at the expense of human lives?”

For seven years Ethan had considered his marriage a closed book. Cruelly, the last few weeks had given him something to live for. Lost now, of course. Thrown away.

“And there would be consequences for your family.”

He dropped all pretense of indifference and stared. “What are you saying?”

“You’re about to be offered a choice. I’m asking you not to make it rashly. The wrong decision would have tragic consequences for the people you love.”

“Is that a threat?”

“You once drew a contrast between the fisherman and the spider. Both feed their offspring, but the fisherman loves his children and the spider does not. I’m not asking you to sympathize with the spider. I’m asking you to make the fisherman’s choice.”

The female sim spoke for a few minutes more, calmly and earnestly. Then she closed her eyes. Her body went slack, her legs folded under her and she dropped to the floor.

Outside Ethan’s cell, the corridor was suddenly quiet. The sound of engines and footsteps subsided. Ventilation fans whispered, the fluorescent ceiling tubes hummed. All else was silence.

30

_{THE ATACAMA}

CASSIE FOUGHT HIM, KICKING AT HIS LEGS and flailing at his face, trying to get enough traction to push herself out the door of the van. She managed to bloody his nose—bright red blood from the human shell of him pulsed down Leo’s upper lip—but he succeeded in pinning her to the seat, grunting through blood-stained teeth as he straddled her legs.

He was strong. He pulled shut the passenger-side door and locked it. With one hand he yanked open the glove compartment. Inside, there was a roll of duct tape and a hunting knife in a leather sheath. He used the tape to bind her wrists, then her ankles. Then he pulled the seat belt tight around her and taped the buckle so she couldn’t release it even if she managed to get her hands free.

She screamed and shouted at him as he did this. But it was late and they were deep in the high desert. A tank truck passed in the opposite direction as she struggled—she saw the word COPEC printed in fading orange letters on its side—but it didn’t stop or even slow down.

Once she was secure, Leo got behind the wheel and steered the van onto the road. Cassie stopped screaming and began quietly cursing him. He ignored her, and she tired quickly. Her throat was raw; her mouth was unbearably dry. She twisted her hands against the duct tape, though it felt as if she were peeling the skin off her wrists.

“Don’t,” Leo said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

She tried to force herself to think. To imagine some way out of this. To get past the choking humiliation of it, a presence as intense as the reek of green matter. She guessed it was Leo’s father who had driven a needle through the lie of Leo’s body and into the stinking truth.

She should have known. This was her own fault. For years she had kept a careful distance from other people, so-called ordinary people, people who had never seen what she had seen, people so authentically innocent they couldn’t even dream such things. She knew what was hidden in the world’s shadows.

But in the end she had lowered her guard. She had given herself to Leo. And the thing she had allowed herself to love was a monstrosity: no, literally a monster. She suppressed the almost unbelievably urgent need to hurt him or run from him and forced herself to look at him: at Leo’s face, now utterly impassive as he watched the road ahead. If Aunt Ris’s theory was correct (and of course it was) this creature had constructed itself in a human womb (I’m not the first woman it violated), making the necessary adjustments so its human shell wouldn’t be some parthenogenic duplicate of its host, a chromosome here, a chromosome there… the end result: this ostensibly male object, the architecture and the furnishings of its skull, the high cheekbones and acne-scarred skin and gentle eyes concealing a filthy knot of green matter where there should have been a brain, every gesture and word and touch (it TOUCHED me, dear god, I LET IT TOUCH ME) dictated by signals from an invisible hive…

She managed to say, “I need to puke.”

“You need to listen to what I’m going to tell you.”

His voice sounded different now. Colder, flatter. Of course it did. He had dropped his mask. Or exchanged it for a different one. “I NEED TO PUKE!”

“Puke, then. Puke on the floor between your legs. Do it now, because if you keep making useless noise I’ll tape your mouth.”

She puked on the floor, not because he said so but because she couldn’t help it. It had been a long time since her last meal. All that came up was a sour brown dribble.

But it helped clear her thoughts. She felt as if she had floated a little way above her aching body.

“You know what I am,” the Leo-thing said. “You expect I’ll lie to you. But I’m not trying to convince you of anything. At this point it doesn’t matter what I want.”

Leo had been the hypercolony’s eyes and ears inside the Correspondence Society, privy even to Werner Beck’s secrets. He could have killed any of them or all of them, any time. Cassie wondered why he hadn’t.

“This van is packed with industrial explosives. Dynamite, the kind they use for blasting in mines. My father’s invention—”

“He’s not your father. You never had a father.”

“My father’s invention is a useless fantasy, but the dynamite is real. You need to know how to use it. Listen to me. I’m going to tell you what a blasting cap looks like, how to attach it to a stick of dynamite and how to fuse it. I don’t have time to tell you twice, so pay attention. You have to remember this.”

“You must be insane,” Cassie said.

But the creature went on talking.

Cassie was aware of the knife. It kept drawing her eye. It was a big knife, maybe ten inches long, in a leather sheath. The Leo-thing kept it wedged between his left leg and the driver’s seat, where she would have a hard time reaching it even if her hands were free.

The Leo-thing talked about how to crimp a blasting cap and how to ignite a fuse. She wondered what the point of all this could possibly be.

“But it’s not enough,” he said, “to ignite some explosives. To do real damage you have to know where to plant them. You have to think about other incendiary material in the environment, the fire that will follow and how it will burn.”

Did these assertions count as lies? Because the simulacra were liars: she had learned that from the Society; it had been implied on every page of her uncle’s book. But no, not liars exactly; they were simply indifferent to truth, had no conception of truth. She said, “What do you expect me to blow up?”

“If you weren’t smart you wouldn’t be here. I could have taken Beth. But you’re smarter and braver than Beth. Where do you think we’re going?”

Her hatred flared up fresh and hot. “Into the fucking desert!”

“Where exactly?”

“How should I know?”

“We’re going to the breeding facility.”

The place Eugene Dowd had described. She had not permitted herself that thought. It was too terrifying. She strained against the seat belt, tried to swing her bound and cramping hands toward the door latch.

“Stop. Calm down. Cassie, think. You know what your aunt said about there being two kinds of sims, two entities competing to control the hypercolony?”

Deep breaths. She closed her eyes. No point wasting her strength. What was left of it. She nodded.

“I want to destroy the facility. It doesn’t matter why. But I can’t do it alone. In fact I can’t do it at all. All I can do is give you a chance.”

She waited for him to go on. Lies, but maybe in his lies she could discover something she could use, some means of leveraging an escape.

“You know what I am,” the Leo-thing said. “I’m not just this body. I’m something larger. I’m older than you can imagine, Cassie. I’m weaker than I was, and I’m being eaten from the inside out. It’s past time for me to die. I want to die. I want you to help me die. Don’t you want that too?”

His voice sounded like the road under the wheels or the thin air skimming past the windows. It sounded like the white moon rising and the hollow basins of the salares. It sounded like the stars.

Where the highway met the railhead in a tangle of fenced yards and boxcars, Leo followed a two-lane road that veered away from San Pedro de Atacama and bisected the desert like a surveyor’s line. He had started talking about dynamite and blasting caps again. Cassie’s attention faded in and out. Words and fragments of words echoed in her head like frantic poetry.

She forced her eyes open and discovered that time had passed, though the sky was still dark. This endless night. Her hands were numb and tingling. Her body ached. Had she been having a nightmare? No. This was the nightmare.

She shook her head to clear it. The reek of sim blood had grown so intense that she no longer smelled it so much as felt it, a pressure in the air. The Leo-thing’s leg was dark with moisture.

The paved road gave way to gravel and ahead of them there was a huge moonlit mound, a wall of earth and debris that Cassie recognized with a kind of anesthetized dread as the breeding ground Eugene Dowd had described. Distant figures moved on the rim of it, black silhouettes against the blue-black sky. Some moved on two legs, some on four.

“Only a few minutes now,” the Leo-thing said.

He unsheathed the knife and leaned toward Cassie. She avoided his eyes and focused on the blade. It was bright and smooth and wickedly sharp. It moved in concert with Leo’s arm like the sting in a scorpion’s tail.

With his free hand he clasped her bound wrists. “Do you remember what I told you? Wake up, Cassie, wake up, this is important!”

She shook her head in incomprehension.

“I can’t hurt them,” Leo said. “There’s very little left of me. But I can shut them down. I can put them to sleep. And I’ll sleep too. Every living thing that operates under the protocols of the hypercolony will stop functioning. For a little while. Only a little while! You’ll be alone. So it’s up to you. You know what to do, right? Do it. And do it quickly.”

Was this the same Leo who had stroked her hair in a bed in a room on the long road down the spine of the Americas? The same Leo who had kissed her and told her to sleep well? Sleep well, Cassie.

He put the blade between her legs and sliced the duct tape binding her ankles. She watched the back of his head as he moved, his fine hair matted with sweat and road grime, the vulnerable nape of his neck. She thought about kicking him but couldn’t summon the strength.

On the distant berm, creatures both two-and four-legged began descending toward the motionless van. They moved with grace and deliberation and an eerie speed. When they passed into the moon-shadow of the hill they seemed to disappear altogether.

Leo drew back and looked at her. “I’m going to cut your hands loose. Hold still.”

She held still. He braced her arms with his body and slit the knot of tape in a single motion. Her hands began to burn as blood flowed back into them. She was still strapped into the seat.

Leo glanced down the road, where the sims were running toward the van, closing in on it, advancing into the glare of the headlights as if they were riding a wave of light. The six-limbed ones made her think of huge crabs, scissoring the air with their claws.

Leo turned the knife in his hand and grasped it by the blade. Cassie saw a line of blood well up from the web of skin between his thumb and index finger. He offered her the handle. She stared at it.

“Take it,” he said.

“What?”

“Take it! Take it, Cassie! Take it!”

She grabbed it from him, gripped the hilt with both hands and aimed the blade at him, her heart hammering in her chest.

“Now cut yourself loose from the seat belt.”

Without taking her eyes off him she felt for the fabric of the belt. She held it away from her hips and sawed at it. It parted, strand by strand, under the pressure of the blade.

“Remember what I told you,” the Leo-thing said.

As soon as he said it his mouth went slack. His head drooped toward his chest. He slumped against the driver’s-side door as she severed the last strands of the seat belt.

She scooted as far from him as she could get, angling the blade at Leo’s inert body. Was this a trick? His eyes were open but they didn’t move. He seemed to be staring with rapt attention at the ceiling of the van.

She spared a glance for the road. A few yards ahead of the van, the approaching sims had also fallen. They lay motionless in the harsh rake of the headlights.

She turned back to Leo. Was he breathing? She watched his chest. His stained blue work shirt moved in a slow but perceptible rhythm. He was unconscious but still alive.

It’s past time for me to die, he had said.

She opened the door so she could escape if she needed to. A gust of wind washed over her. She gulped cold air into her lungs.

She leaned into Leo’s unconscious body and stared into his unseeing eyes. Pupils like black pennies. Under the reek of sim blood she could smell the sharp human tang of his sweat. It was the way he had smelled when he hovered over her in bed, his arms braced and his back arched in a perfect tensioned curve. That earthy smell, like garden soil in sunlight.

She put the knife to his neck where it sloped from his Adam’s apple to the V-shape of his collarbone. She could see a faint pulse beating there. The point of the knife pricked his pale skin and one perfect red pearl of blood welled up.

Sleep well.

She put both hands on the handle of the knife and leaned forward.

She pushed Leo’s body out of the van and took his place in the driver’s seat. The puddle of blood on the vinyl upholstery stained her jeans and added its coppery stink to the redolent air. She put the vehicle in gear and drove slowly forward. She steered around the inert sims on the road. The human ones looked like people who had fainted or fallen asleep. The six-limbed ones—some with sharp claws at the end of their forearms, some with small, delicately-fingered hands—looked like sideshow monstrosities cobbled together from wax and animal fur.

At the top of the berm—she could see the installation below, the bunkers and smokestacks and the strange steel structure poised at the center of it like a gigantic flower—her courage nearly failed. Even with the explosives in the van, how could she possibly damage something so huge? Leo had told her how to fuse the dynamite and where to put it, but her memory was stuttering and imperfect and she distrusted everything he had said. She couldn’t go on.

All she had was momentum, and that was what carried the vehicle downhill into the sim town while she worked the brake sporadically. The grid of roads was linear and precise, every intersection burning with artificial light. Sims were everywhere, lying where they had fallen—not dead, she reminded herself, merely asleep, and not forever. They might wake at any moment. She drove over some of the bodies. They popped like rotten fruit.

She aimed the van at the metallic flower at the center of the facility. Under it, Leo had said, was an entire underground city: a city she could not imagine herself entering.

She was approaching an unmarked archway and a descending ramp when she saw something move in the sweep of her headlights. Cassie stood on the brakes. The suspension bottomed out and the rear of the vehicle skidded to starboard. She stared ahead. The distant motion became a comprehensible shape, a shadow puppet flailing its arms; it came still closer and turned into a human silhouette. A sim… but no. Not a sim.

She recognized him from the photo she stared at every time she read The Fisherman and the Spider. It was her uncle Ethan.

He didn’t seem surprised to see her and she was too dazed to be startled by his presence. She opened the passenger-side door and he climbed into the van. If the stink of blood and green matter offended him, he didn’t show it. She wanted to hug him but her clothes were sticky with blood. In her relief and astonishment Cassie began stammering out the story of the attack in Antofagasta.

She expected her uncle to interrupt her, to ask questions or offer an explanation of his own. He did neither, and the look on his face finally frightened her into silence. That owl-eyed emptiness: was it pity or dread or something worse? It occurred to her to wonder what had happened to him down in the undercity of the simulacra.

He seemed to be struggling to speak. “Cassie,” he said at last. “How did you get here?”

All she could say was, “Leo brought me.” She held up the palm of one bloody hand, as if that were an explanation.

“You know what this place is?”

“Yes!”

“What do you want to do here?”

“I want to burn it down! Isn’t that what you want?”

Strangely, he was a long time answering.

“Everything has a price,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“What we do here doesn’t end here. What we destroy here isn’t all we destroy.”

Was this even addressed to her? Her joy at finding him began to shrivel into something like dread. She took her left hand from the wheel and put it on the handle of the knife, still slick with Leo’s blood. Could she be sure her uncle Ethan was even a human being? “I have this truck full of dynamite and Leo said it was important to use it the right way—he told me the places I should put it but I don’t really remember—it’s hard to remember—and I don’t know if he was telling the truth—”

“I can show you the places. Where the fuel is, where they generate power, where they grow what they grow. We can burn it all. All of it that matters.”

“Will you really help me?”

He looked past the blood-spattered window of the van as if at something far away. “We’ll help each other.”

31

_ANTOFAGASTA

NERISSA FORCED THOMAS UP THE STAIRS of the safe house. She held tight to him as he tried to pull away from her and join the fighting below, either to protect his sister or to prove he wasn’t afraid—endangering himself, in either case; but she was strong enough to clasp him in her arms and wrestle him to the second-story landing. She turned back just once, at the sound of a gunshot, in time to see Beth Vance tumble onto the risers with blood gushing from her open skull. She hoped Thomas hadn’t seen that, but maybe he had: he was suddenly more tractable as she pushed him into a bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

There was a bathroom attached the bedroom and she huddled there with Thomas, listening to the noise of the invasion. What ever heroic instinct had possessed Thomas, it abandoned him now. He crawled into the narrow space between the toilet and the tub and sat there, hugging his knees. Nerissa pressed her body against the door, sickly aware that their hiding place was no hiding place at all, that it was a cul-de-sac and would become a coffin if the sims succeeded in storming the house.

But the gunfire reached a crescendo and stopped. She looked at her watch. She tried to steady her breathing. She told Thomas to keep as quiet as he could, quiet as a mouse. She watched the minute hand circle the dial. Five minutes passed and there was nothing to hear but the creaking of beams and rafters as the afternoon heat subsided. Seven minutes. Ten. She detected the keening of distant police sirens.

She risked opening the bathroom door. Daylight was waning and the bedroom had filled with shadows. “Stay here,” she told Thomas, but he followed her into the hall.

There was no sound from downstairs. She took the enormous risk of calling out Cassie’s name. Had there been any answer—even the weakest response—she would have braved the gore-splattered stairs. But no answer came. If Cassie had survived she must already have fled. Fleeing was the only sane thing to do. The sound of the police sirens had grown noticeably louder.

The front of the house had been breached and the gunfire would surely have attracted a crowd in the street; it would be impossible to leave by the front door. A French door in the bedroom opened onto a tiny balcony overlooking the alley, and Nerissa put her head out to reconnoiter. It would be a long drop to the pavement… but if she climbed over the wrought-iron railing and dangled by her hands it might not be so bad. And then she could help Thomas down.

She explained the plan to Thomas. His face was as pale as parchment and he looked dazed, but he nodded as if he understood.

She made sure she had her wallet, which contained identification both real and fake and a stash of U.S. dollars and Chilean pesos. The alleyway was empty but probably wouldn’t be for long. She clambered over the railing and dangled from the ornamental iron pickets. When she dropped to the pavement she turned her ankle. Pain spiked from her calf to her hip, but she forced herself to stand. “Now you,” she called to Thomas.

He peered down from the balcony, his face a contortion of doubt and dread.

“I’ll catch you if you fall. You trust me?”

The boy nodded.

“All right, then. Come on—we have to hurry.”

He dropped into her arms; her ankle turned again; they sprawled on the grimy pavement but were safe.

“Take my hand,” she said, standing.

Thomas put his feverishly hot hand in hers. As she hobbled away, a busboy from the restaurant three doors south stepped into the alley and called after her: “¿Estás bien? ¿Necesita ayuda?”

“Estamos bien,” she shouted back, “gracias,” and turned a corner.

They boarded a city bus into Antofagasta’s business district and got out when Nerissa spotted a Holiday Inn that looked like it catered to Americans. Her scuffed hands and torn jeans drew sidelong looks from the lobby staff as she checked in, but cash on the countertop forestalled any awkward questions.

In their room she washed Thomas’s face—he looked at her impassively around the daubing of the washcloth—and encouraged him to lie down. He stretched out on the bed without complaint or comment.

She switched on the television, lowered the volume and pulled a chair close to the set. As much as she distrusted TV and radio, they were the only accessible source of news. The local TVN station opened its evening broadcast with an account of the attack, pitched as a multiple murder, possibly drug-related. Police were being cagey about the number of deaths, no doubt because of the problematic nature of the corpses the sims had left behind. There had been, the newscast said, “three confirmed deaths, two males and one female.” If the female was Beth Vance, the two males were probably Eugene Dowd and either Leo or Werner Beck.

Which meant Cassie had escaped. At least, that was a hope to which Nerissa could cling. Though even if it was true, she might never see Cassie again. Cassie might try to make her way back to the States, perhaps to the survivor circle in Buffalo, but possibly not. And it might be better if she didn’t.

She left the chair to feed Thomas and herself on what she could find in the bar fridge (chocolate, crackers, orange juice), to console him with soft words and finally to tuck him under the covers. Then back to the television, on the chance that it might yield new information. None was forthcoming. After midnight the newscast gave way to a dubbed Hollywood movie, decades old.

Nerissa’s thoughts began to fracture and veer strangely. She was exhausted, but this was more than fatigue, more even than despair: it felt like an expanding emptiness at the center of herself. She told herself she ought to go to bed, but standing up seemed like too much trouble. Instead she slouched more deeply into the chair and let her eyes drift shut. The sound of dubbed voices speaking hurried and awkward Spanish faded into noise. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is as shallow as time. Who had said that? Samuel Johnson, she thought. Or no, Thomas Carlyle. She couldn’t remember.

32

_{THE ATACAMA}

CASSIE STOOD BACK AS HER UNCLE inspected the contents of the van. She tried not to think about the sims lying all around her, unconscious but drawing breath. The launch tower loomed above her like a night-blooming flower. A cold wind guttered through the compound, stirring up miniature whirlwinds in the dusty streets. She shivered.

Ethan pulled Werner Beck’s radio-interference device—a useless piece of wishful thinking, he called it—out of the truck and set it aside. Over his shoulder Cassie saw stacked blocks of what looked like lead-ingots in red waxed paper. “Enough to do damage,” he said. “But we only have three sets of timers and batteries.”

“Is that bad?”

“We can plant charges in the breeding rooms, the generator rooms, and under the launch mechanism.”

“Will that be enough?”

“I hope so.”

He got in the van—behind the wheel, ignoring the mess of blood and green matter there—and beckoned her after. No, Cassie thought. Crawl back into the stinking space where the Leo-thing had bled out? Impossible. But her feet carried her there. Some dumb instinct that could not possibly be courage forced her inside. She resisted the urge to cover her ears as Uncle Ethan started the motor. She was careful not to look back as the night sky disappeared behind her.

What Uncle Ethan called “the breeding room” was at the end of a long down-sloping ramp in a maze of such ramps and corridors. In several places the passage was blocked by stationary vehicles or mounded bodies. Her uncle became adept at putting these vehicles into gear and rolling them out of the way; twice, she helped by dragging aside the inert bodies of sims. Human sims mostly, but the other kind, too. The strange ones. The fur on their limbs was dense and moist, and they had a chemical smell, like turpentine. The ones with small six-fingered hands were unpleasant to look at; the ones with claws like box cutters were worse.

The breeding room when they reached it looked to Cassie like an oversized, cruelly impersonal hospital ward. There were long rows of beds, many still occupied by the bodies of obviously pregnant female sims, alongside ranks of what were probably mechanized incubators. The glass walls of the incubators were glazed with moisture, but Cassie could make out distorted images of the infants inside. Some apparently human, some not. All breathing. Worse, all breathing in unison.

Uncle Ethan mounded up roughly a third of the incendiary blocks next to the bank of incubators. He crimped and inserted blasting caps and ran wires back to the igniter, but hesitated over the timer.

“The timer’s jury-rigged to the electric initiator,” Cassie said. “The Leo-thing told me how to work it.”

Uncle Ethan gave her a sharp look. “Leo told you that?”

“He said this is what he wanted. He said he wanted to die. I mean it wanted to die. The hypercolony. Or what ever was left of it—his part of it.”

She repeated what little she remembered of what Leo had told her to memorize about the explosives in the truck. “He said he wanted us to destroy this place because it’s been taken over by a kind of parasite. Is that true?”

“It might be.”

“But that means Leo—the Leo-thing—was part of the original hypercolony.”

“Yes.”

“He’s what killed my parents.”

“Yes.”

“But we’re doing what he wants.”

“For our own reasons, Cassie.”

“He’s using us, the way the hypercolony has always used us.”

Uncle Ethan torqued a wire into a binding post. “It doesn’t matter. If we kill them, we kill all of them. Both kinds.” He showed her the timer, which looked like it had been cobbled together from hardware-store parts. “One hour,” he said. “Make a note of the time and keep an eye on your watch. I’ll keep an eye on mine.”

If we have an hour.

They got back in the van.

The generator rooms were even deeper in the complex, where the air was hot and had an metallic tang the roaring ventilators couldn’t carry away. The central chamber was an inverted bowl the size of a football stadium, insulated with foamed concrete and crowded with a bewildering assembly of equipment racks, conduits, electrical generators and hydraulic pumps. Uncle Ethan began to make a stack of incendiary bricks next to an enormous white tank on which the word PROPANO was printed in orange letters. He worked methodically, almost robotically, and Cassie helped by handing down slabs of explosives from the van. She tried not to think about the weight of the earth over her head or the way each minute slipped away like something precious, lost. She wondered what would happen after the detonation. Would all the sims in the world drop dead? How many families would discover that a son or sister or mother or grandfather had been something inhuman—that they had given their love to a disgusting lie?

Uncle Ethan struggled with the initiator. Sweat dripped from his forehead to the dusty concrete floor. Finally the timer light sprang on. He looked at his watch and asked Cassie to look at hers. They agreed that twenty-eight minutes had passed since they left the nursery. He set the timer for thirty-two minutes.

They headed upgrade, and this time there were no vehicles or sims to push out of the way. It was good that Uncle Ethan had known how to find the vulnerable parts of the installation. But that raised another question. One she was almost afraid to ask. “How did you get here?”

He kept his eyes on the corridor ahead. “What?”

“Before you found me. Before I came. How did you get here? What were you doing?”

“They caught me on the road and took me prisoner.”

“Why didn’t they just kill you?”

“They said they wanted my help.”

“What, to protect them?”

“They wanted me not to do what we’re doing now.”

“And they thought you’d agree to that?”

“I guess they thought there was a chance.”

“Why? Did they threaten you? Did they promise you something?”

Uncle Ethan wouldn’t answer. He just drove. And here was the night sky again. The steel and glass flower of the launch mechanism, the crater-rim of industrial waste, the unconscious sims, the scouring wind.

Uncle Ethan parked at the base of the launch tower, under the overhang of the huge mirrored petals. The last of the explosive bricks were in the back of the van. “Do we put them inside?” The tower at ground level appeared seamlessly solid. “There’s no door.”

“And no time.”

Cassie held her wrist up to the roof light of the van and read her watch. He was right. Ten minutes until the underground charges were due to detonate, not long enough to finish rigging the third timer and get clear. “So what do we do?”

“Take a clean vehicle and get out of here.”

They left the van. One of the ubiquitous white pickup trucks was parked a few yards away. Uncle Ethan pulled the limp body of a sim from behind the wheel and started the engine.

Cassie climbed into the passenger seat and waited while Uncle Ethan returned to the van and unscrewed the gas cap. He took off his shirt, twisted one arm of it and used it to wick up a little gasoline. Then he opened the hood and wadded the shirt into the engine compartment. She understood that he meant to set fire to the van: there would be no need for a detonator when the flames reached the dynamite. But he hesitated.

No match, Cassie thought. No cigarette lighter. Uncle Ethan didn’t smoke. Eugene Dowd would have had a lighter. But Eugene Dowd had been shot to death back in Antofagasta.

Her uncle tugged loose an ignition wire and sparked it next to the gas-soaked cloth—once, twice, until a high yellow flame popped out of the darkness. He stumbled back, coughing.

Cassie looked at her watch as he climbed back behind the wheel. Less than five minutes now. But enough. Uncle Ethan put the truck in gear and drove. They had covered maybe half the ground between the launch tower and the mound wall when the sims began to stand up.

Simultaneously, as if they were following some kind of choreography, a nightmarish ballet, the sims rose to their feet and began to run toward the launch tower. Uncle Ethan swerved to avoid a knot of them. The truck fishtailed and stalled; he cursed and began to work the key in the ignition. One of the six-limbed sims vaulted over the pickup, rocking the vehicle on its suspension as it rebounded from the truck bed. We’ll be killed, Cassie thought.

But the sims ignored them in their rush to the launch tower. The faces of the sims were slack and indifferent—they’re not pretending to be human anymore. She looked back and saw with horror that they were converging on the burning van, trying to smother the fire with their bodies. But the van was burning fiercely and the sims who threw themselves on it were instantly engulfed: the flames took their clothes, their limbs, the human and alien skin of them, the payload of green matter inside.

Uncle Ethan managed to start the engine. Cassie checked her watch. “It’s time.”

“I know.”

“Nothing’s happening.”

Her uncle didn’t answer.

“They might have disarmed the igniters.”

“I know, Cassie.”

“But—”

She felt the detonation before she heard it. The ground bucked and threw a haze of dust into the air. The sound of the explosion was muffled and prolonged, like thunder. A second explosion followed. Sirens wailed throughout the compound, then fell silent. The streetlights flickered and went out. The sudden darkness concealed everything but the flicker of fire from the burning van behind them. Then the wind began to clear the haze, and Uncle Ethan drove by a faint but brightening glow in the eastern sky.

They reached the berm as the fire ignited the last incendiary charges. Cassie saw the explosion: a blinding white starburst followed by a shock wave that rocked the pickup. Uncle Ethan braked. “Keep your head down,” he said.

“Why?”

“Shrapnel.”

Fragments of metal and glass peppered the roof. Something big hit the glass of the windshield and rolled smoking off the hood. Cassie squeezed her eyes shut and gripped her uncle’s hand until the hail of debris stopped.

Behind them, the launch tower stood at the foot of a thickening plume of smoke. Its mirrored petals were skewed; one was missing; another shattered and collapsed as she watched. And the sims had fallen down again. The sky was light enough now that she could see the bodies where they lay, a dense drift of them (she thought of autumn leaves) close to the base of the launch tower. There were only a few here on the rim of the embankment, but one had fallen close to the truck. Uncle Ethan surprised her by getting out of the van and crossing a few yards of gravel and industrial debris to the inert body.

She scooted out and stood behind him as he knelt and put his hand on the sim’s throat, checking for a pulse.

“Is it dead?”

“Not yet.”

Not yet. But it was clearly dying. The sim gasped and arched its spine, and Uncle Ethan stumbled back a pace. The creature took three deep, stertorous breaths. Its eyes opened but the pupils were motionless and huge. Another breath. Another. Then it exhaled through clenched teeth, a tuneless whistling. No inhalation followed.

Almost dawn, and the desert had taken on a pale clarity. Salt basins and a horizon buckled by black basaltic hills. The wind plucking at this ridge of trash.

We’re alone now, Cassie thought.

Her uncle bent over the sim once more. There was something almost tender in the way he touched it. She guessed by the expression on his face that the creature was truly dead. What ever had inhabited it was gone for good and all.

But her uncle looked grim, even mournful. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

And Cassie was shocked. “Are you apologizing to it?”

He stood and brushed his hands together. “I’m not sorry for them.” He stared at her—or no, Cassie thought, through her, as if at something terrible that no one else could see. “I’m sorry for all of us.” Behind him, the burning compound raised flags of smoke. “Now let’s get out of here. And, Cassie? You know we can’t talk about this. No one can ever know we were here.”

The last unspeakable truth, she thought.

33

_ANTOFAGASTA

NERISSA CAME AWAKE IN THE CHAIR where she had slept. It was only just dawn, faint light seeping through the window of the hotel room. The television was on—she had neglected to turn it off—but all it showed was empty static. There had been a sound, she was sure of it, here in the room, half-heard, indistinct but loud enough to wake her. “Thomas?” she said.

She was not even sure the sound had come from him. A cough, a gasp? She stood, still groggy. There were faint voices from the corridor beyond the door, one of them a woman’s voice repeating something like I’ve tried and tried and I can’t get through. Nerissa took a tentative step. Her left leg was numb, the ankle tender where she had fallen on it. She limped to the side of the bed where Thomas lay.

What she saw there made no sense: Thomas lying on his back, not breathing. His spine in an arch. His small hands crumpled into fists. His eyes open and unblinking. His pupils as big as two black pennies.

For one lunatic moment it all seemed simply unreal, as if someone had stolen her nephew and replaced him with a crude, distorted replica. She heard herself saying his name. She put her hand on his forehead but his skin was cold. And now began the first wave of comprehension, the first approach of the grief and rage that would embrace her like pitiless, implacable giants. Some part of her wanted to call for help—to pick up the phone and demand a doctor. But the saner part of her knew that no doctor could help Thomas now. Her legs lost their strength. She slid to the floor next to the bed.

She lay there until a patch of sunlight from the window found her. Were there things she should be doing? Yes. But she wasn’t able to think clearly about that. She managed to stand up without looking at the bed. She didn’t want to see what was on the bed.

There was a tentative knock at the door—the maid, perhaps, though Nerissa had put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. Of course she couldn’t let anyone in. She left the chain latch engaged but opened the door an inch. She saw a woman she didn’t recognize—middle-aged, well-dressed, probably American. “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Were you sleeping?”

Nerissa shook her head.

“I was wondering, is your telephone working? Because mine isn’t, and I need to get a call through to Indiana.”

“You should ask the hotel staff.”

“I have! All they do is apologize. No phone, no radio, no television, no anything. Not here or anywhere. Or so they say. I thought this was a civilized country!”

“I can’t help you,” Nerissa said.

She eased the door shut and leaned against the jamb, trying to correlate these new data points. The failure of communication. The death of her nephew. The floral smell she noticed when she turned back to the room.

On the bed, Thomas’s body had shrunken. It had, Nerissa thought, deflated. Under the rucked-up T-shirt he had slept in, Thomas’s rib cage was prominent over an empty sack of sagging skin. Watery green matter had begun to escape from the openings of his body. The bed was damp with it. An emerald-colored drop formed in his left nostril as she watched.

This was not Thomas. There was no Thomas. There had never been a Thomas.

“Ethan,” she whispered. “What have you done?”

She could not, of course, remain in the room. Not a second longer than necessary. Which clarified things.

She had no luggage. Just the contents of her purse. Without looking again at the bed, she double-checked to make sure nothing was left behind. Nothing was. Nothing human.

She replaced the DO NOT DISTURB / SILENCIO POR FAVOR sign as she left the room. Inevitably, the hotel staff would discover the body of the sim. But by then, perhaps, very little would be left of it.

The concierge—a young woman in freshly-pressed hotel livery—approached her as she crossed the lobby to the door. “Are you going out?”

“Yes,” Nerissa said.

“You might want to be careful. There’s something bad going on. No radio, no television—the phones don’t work. We can’t even call a cab! You’re American, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I saw you come in last night. Are you all right? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m all right. Thank you.”

“What about your little boy—is he with you?”

“No. His uncle took him away.”

“Oh, you have family in town?

“No,” Nerissa said. “I have no family.”