by Jay Lake
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For Bronwyn, known as the Child. And my loving thanks to Lisa.
For everyone who’s ever read one of my stories, or any story, really.
In the end, words are all that survive us.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Foreword by Gene Wolfe
Last Plane to Heaven: A Love Story
Angels i The Houses of the Favored
SCIENCE AND OTHER FICTIONS
The Starship Mechanic
Permanent Fatal Errors
“Hello,” Said the Gun
The Speed of Time
West to East
The Women Who Ate Stone Squid
Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder
Angels ii Scent of the Green Cathedral
STEAM, PUNKS, AND FAIRIES
Spendthrift
Jefferson’s West
They Are Forgotten Until They Come Again
The Woman Who Shattered the Moon
The Blade of His Plow
Grindstone
The Temptation of Eustace Prudence McAllen
That Which Rises Ever Upward
Angels iii A Feast of Angels
PHANTASIES OF STYLE AND PLACE
Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable
Testaments
The Fall of the Moon
A Critical Examination of Stigmata’s Print Taking the Rats to Riga
From the Countries of Her Dreams
Unchambered Heart
Angels iv Novus Ordo Angelorum
DESCENT INTO DARKNESS
The Tentacled Sky
Such Bright and Risen Madness in Our Names
Her Fingers Like Whips, Her Eyes Like Razors
Mother Urban’s Book of Dayes
Angels v Going Bad
THE END
The Cancer Catechism
Afterword
Tor Books by Jay Lake
About the Author
Copyright Acknowledgments
Copyright
Foreword
BY GENE WOLFE
Though I could be completely wrong in your case, I have a deep and troubling feeling that you almost never read short stories. As I say, I could be wrong—but the odds are in my favor. There was a time, now long past, when everyone who read, read short stories. What happened? I think I know and I am about to tell you.
Two things. The first is simply that more and more people read reviews. (To explain why that happened would take us too far afield.) Reviews of fiction are almost entirely of novels. Reviews of novels are much easier to write. There is the jacket copy, smiling its idiot smile and offering a helping hand to the reviewer. One may generally write the whole thing after reading the first chapter, one or two chapters from the middle, and the last chapter. This though the novel has twenty or thirty chapters. Furthermore (I bet you didn’t know this), publishers often send along a sample review with the review copy of the book. Should you see exactly the same review in two publications, you will know what happened. To feign originality, change a word here and there. “Exciting” becomes “thrilling,” “very” becomes “exceedingly,” and so forth (or on). This at least looks (appears) more honest. The people who read reviews nearly always buy novels as a result, so the thing feeds upon itself.
That first reason is easy enough to explain and to understand. The second is much more difficult. Reading short stories takes a certain tough-mindedness. A novel is a kiss in the moonlight—soft, romantic, gentle, and perfumed. A short story is you and another naked in a dark and sweltering room without a bed. No breeze enters the open windows; beyond the screens, mosquitoes buzz in the dark. You come together and the other’s body is slick with sweat, like your own. Someone’s heart is pounding; perhaps they both are, but it’s hard to tell. If you don’t understand what I mean, read a few of these; you’ll understand it better then.
The kiss in the moonlight often appeals to a tender mind. That hot, humid room frightens it to paralysis.
That said, there are people who cannot read fiction at all. You know the type. Somehow she never found the right man. Somehow he never found the right girl. Generally they are neat and orderly and perhaps a little acrophobic. Often they make ideal employees, provided they are not asked to take responsibility. They are hard but brittle.
Clearly you are not one of them.
Tough-mindedness used to be the rule. If you don’t believe me, listen to a few old songs: “I’m a ox-drivin’ man from the Kane County line / An’ I’ll whip any man touches one ox o’ mine! / I’ll beat him with the ox-goad, you see if I don’t try. / So it’s poke them cattle onward, boys. Root hog, er die!”
“She jumped on her pony so airy and rode like she carried the mail, / With eyes just as wide as the prairie ’long side of the Santa Fe Trail.”
I’ve quoted two from memory where I might have quoted a hundred. If you’ve read them, you understand what I mean. If you’ve sung them, that’s better yet. If you’re a purist, you may slang me all you like for quoting from memory lyrics that are not precisely like those you found in some book. Those songs have been sung and sung again, edited, altered, and trimmed to fit for a century and more. The people were like that, tough as an old boot, and they told each other stories around the fire.
Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with a kiss in the moonlight. But that moonlight kiss should not be all there is. It should be a beginning, not an end. Many of you, I fear, think of Jay Lake mainly or even exclusively as a novelist. He is, and a great one. Even so, he began (as nearly all of us do) as a short story writer, and he was a well-known and much admired short story writer before Mainspring. So test yourself. Read “Last Plane to Heaven,” the story that has given its title to this whole book. If you can’t finish it, you’ve failed. If you finished it and enjoyed it (I know that if you don’t enjoy it you won’t finish it) but find there are certain things you don’t understand, read it again. If you enjoyed it the second time and understand it a little better, you don’t have to read it a third time unless you want to. You’ve made it. You’re on the team.
Before I run completely out of words, I want to assure you that the title of this collection was not drawn out of a hat. As soon as you read “The Houses of the Favored,” you should understand what I just told you. “Starship Mechanic” will drive it home.
Here I had planned to tell you what you ought to admire most about these stories. “Had” is the operative word. There are so many things to admire that I can’t choose one or even two. First of all their range; Jay’s steed is fast and sure of foot, and it jumps canyons and climbs mountains. Their modernity too—they could not have been written fifty years ago; many could not have been written twenty-five years ago. Certainly they would not have been published, read, and understood then. Their originality, certainly.
And the steely glint of the captain’s eyes.
Last Plane to Heaven: A Love Story
* * *
I went to Outer Mongolia for the first time in 1990. Parts of this story are true, and happ
ened to me then. Most of it is made up. You decide what to believe.
* * *
Nichols tried to light a cigarette, one of those fucking Paki horse turds. “Know why God made the ’stans?” His palm cupped the flame against the steppe winds. Must’ve been burning his fingers, but if he didn’t care, I sure as hell didn’t.
“Hell if I know.” The dust out here was like to drive me to tears, Oakley wraparounds or not. That shit got in the cracks of everything. My shoulders ached like a son of a bitch, too, after standing around all day with a SAM tube on my shoulder. I shifted the Stinger, listening for that familiar tubercular roar of old Sov-built engines. The Antonov was overdue.
He got his horse turd lit, took a long, coughing drag. “Shit’s got to come out somewhere, that’s why.” A gap-toothed grin, where a couple of Uzbek hash merchants had kicked him hard a few months back. He’d eaten their ears a bit later. “The ’stans are the asshole of the Earth. America, we’re the tits. Land of milk and honey.”
Tits was right, I thought. But honey? Something chattered out there. I scanned the northeast over the hardpan. Nothing but scattered grass and endless identical miles, while the dust was making a silver-brown hash of the Gobi sky.
No sign of the Antonov.
Maybe I’d heard the windsock snapping.
“Ain’t you gonna ask?” he said, after another deep drag.
“Ask what?”
“Where the world’s pussy is?”
I knew better than to walk into that one, so I just returned his grin. I still had all my teeth.
“Aw, fuck it.” Nichols pitched the flaring cigarette into the wind. It bounced past the wheel ruts on the desert floor then vanished into dust, leaving a flare on my vision.
“Don’t do that shit, man.”
“Snipers?” His laugh was as harsh as his cigarettes. “Here? Hiding behind what? The sky, maybe. You’re the pussy, Allen. Pussy of the world, right here.”
“Snipers my ass.” I was less confident than him on that. Not much less, but a careful troopie lived to see chow call. “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
“Smokey the fucking Mongolian bear!”
Then the Antonov was overhead, growling out of the dust in a reek of fuel and old metal, the pilot looking for the windsock.
* * *
Say what you want about Sov technology, the shit they built just keeps working. That old An-17 had probably been flying, badly, when I was playing kill-the-ragheads in the Oregon forests as a kid. It was still flying badly now. As the fly-guys say, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.
The south Gobi is a series of very shallow valleys bordered by low ridges a half dozen klicks apart. The desert is sort of like prairie gone bad, with stubby, dried grasses, the odd flower, and a hell of a lot of gravel. If you look up and down the valleys, you can see the edge of the world.
The strip here was a windsock stuck in the hardpan. Every now and then someone got tired of the planes bouncing in their wheel ruts and replanted the windsock fifty yards farther east. There was an archaeology of occupation and warfare written in the tracks of old landing gear.
Most of the Westerners in the ’stans were like Nichols. Smart enough, and stone killers in a firefight or on a silent op, but pretty much baboons otherwise. A million years ago they would have been the big apes throwing shit from the trees. Now they’re out here capping ragheads and steppe weasels. I guess that beats breaking elbows for money back home.
I tried explaining Temujin to Nichols one time as we were burning some idealistic kids out of an eight-hundred-year-old temple. Blue-faced demons crisped to winter ash while their ammo cooked off in a funeral cantata. He’d just laughed and told me to go back to college if I didn’t like it here.
It’s a beautiful country, Mongolia. All the ’stans are beautiful in their way. Xin Jiang, too. Nichols was wrong about this being the asshole of the earth. God had made these countries, all right, to remind us all how damned tough the world was. And how beauty could rise from the hard choices and broken lives.
Then God in His infinite wisdom had chosen to people these lands with some of the toughest sons of bitches to ever draw breath. These people could hold a grudge for a thousand years and didn’t mind eating bullets to avenge their honor.
Fuck you very much, God, for Your beauty and Your terror. Not to mention Sov aircraft to dust us off to the brothels of Ulan Bator every once in a while. Nothing expressed God’s love for His world like warm North Korean beer and elderly Chechen hookers.
* * *
“Yo, Allen, get in here!”
It was Korunov. His head bobbed out the weathered orange door of the ger that served as our HQ. Ex-KGB counterintel guy. He’d spent a lot of time at the USA-Canada Institute, back when that was still cranking, and spoke with the damnedest accent. His voice was part Alabama cornpone and part Ukrainian street hustler, squeaking out of a two-hundred-kilo butterball.
Hell, he must have been thin once. Nobody starts out life that kind of fat.
Korunov considered himself a man of the world. He was also the paymaster of our little unit, so when he yo’d, I ho’d.
Nichols and Korunov were crowded into the ger along with Batugan—our Mongolian controller back in UB and the only man to get off the Antonov upon arrival. As always, the pilot remained on board to keep his points hot. Plus Hannaday was there. He was an Agency cowboy I’d last seen on the wrong end of a Glock in Kandahar two years earlier. Whipcord thin, still wearing the same damned Armani suit.
How the fuck had that spook gotten into the camp without me seeing him? My legs still ached whenever it got chilly. I briefly considered firing off my Stinger inside the ger, just punching the warhead into Hannaday’s chest, but that would have pretty much toasted us all.
“Stow it,” growled Korunov. Two hundred kilos or not, that man could and did snap necks.
“What’s he doing here?” I wouldn’t meet Hannaday’s gaze. “He’s worse trouble than the insurgency.”
Batugan gave me his oily smile. I don’t think he had any other kind, truth be told. “Mr. Hannaday has bought out your contracts.”
“My contract wasn’t up for sale to him.”
Korunov got too close to me. “Sit. Listen.”
I laid the Stinger against the tent walls, loosed the holster on my Smitty, then pulled up one of those little orange Mongolian stools. I never took my eyes off Hannaday’s hands. “Listening, sir.”
“You should be—” Batugan began, but Korunov interrupted. “Not your show anymore, Genghis.”
The fat man’s voice dropped, sympathy or perhaps an attempt at camaraderie, as he turned to me. “Our financial backers have pulled out. Batugan flew here to cut us loose.”
Cut us loose here? We were a training cadre. They brought in kids with attitude, we ran them through some high-fatality training, they pulled them back out to go fight the bad guys. There was no way out but by plane. That way the kids wouldn’t run off. And no one ever came around asking inconvenient questions about the row of graves on the far side of the ger camp.
You could make it out by truck. Damned long haul, though, and you had to pack along enough water and fuel. Didn’t matter anyhow. There weren’t any trucks in camp right now, just a couple of old Chinese-surplus BJC jeeps.
Not a lot of landmarks in the south Gobi. Sure as hell no roads.
“So?” I wasn’t a decision maker. Why were they telling me?
Korunov chose his words carefully. “Mr. Hannaday here is bankrolling airfare back to Los Angeles or Frankfurt, plus a generous kill fee.”
I finally met Hannaday’s eyes. They gleamed that same eerie blue as back in Kandahar. His smile died there.
“I don’t care what he wants. I’d rather walk than take his money.”
“That’s why we need you, Mr. Allen,” Hannaday said. “The unit listens to you.” There was something wrong with his voice—it grated, almost fading out.
With that clue, even in the shadowed ger
, I could make out a scar seaming his throat. It was a glossy trail just above the crisp Windsor knot of his tie. I’d lost my best knife in that throat, the day he shot me.
“You don’t talk right, I don’t walk right.” Which was why I trained instead of killed these days. “I think we’ve done enough for each other.” I stood, grabbed my missile rack.
“Allen.” It was Korunov.
I owed him. Lots. I stopped to listen. “Yeah?”
“We don’t have seats on the plane. None of us. Not without Mr. Hannaday.”
I had eleven guys outside who were real good at knocking over airplanes, Nichols chief among them. But I also had eleven guys outside who weren’t going to be happy about hiking out of the south Gobi.
“We got return bonds, Sergei,” I told Korunov softly.
He shrugged, his face impassive. “If we were elsewhere, we could cash them. Mr. Hannaday bought the air transport contract from Batugan before he bought our paper.”
I had my Smitty out and two rounds in Batugan, one in each thigh. The Mongolian fell off his stool sobbing, curling to clutch at his legs. Neither Hannaday nor Korunov moved. Neither one drew down on me.
“So I am worth something to you, you son of a bitch.” Careful not to point the weapon at Hannaday, I holstered the pistol. “What the fuck do you want, airplane man?”
“Like you, I’m—”
“You’ll never be like me, you fucking Langley suit.”
“Please,” Hannaday said. One hand stroked the knot of his tie. I hoped like hell the scar ached as bad as my legs. “Fort Meade. And, like you, I’m a contractor now.” Without looking, he leaned over slightly and slapped Batugan hard. The Mongolian quieted his blubbering.
That drew a reluctant laugh out of me. “Big spookery all get outsourced to India?”
“Pakistan, actually. In the name of funding and plausible deniability.”
“Fuck yeah. What’s your point?”
“We’re going to bring in a special subject. We need your team to play like Ukrainian mercs for about a week. Ride the subject hard, put them in some real fear, then let them be extracted.”