Last Plane to Heaven (5 page)

“It'll never happen,” he gasped, gritting his teeth. Hannaday smelled like a corpse already, shit and old meat. “Thing is, she dropped out of orbit. But she never went up in the first place, Allen. She
came
from up there.”

I shot him in the temple, then said, “Wake up,” in the voices of a dozen screaming GIs in a burning helicopter.

*   *   *

There was no Becque this time, but the camp was empty. I nosed into a couple of
gers
. Everybody's gear was here, just not their personal selves.

The Antonov was parked by the windsock, both engines intact.

It was daylight. I couldn't check the stars, but I didn't really need to. This was real life, whatever that meant these days. I took my Stinger rack and headed out toward the plane.

Spacegirl sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, huddled in her Russian flight suit.

“It's true, isn't it?” I asked.

She shrugged.

“You'll own us all.”

Another shrug.

“You're the weirdest alien invasion in history. What do you
want
?”

She glanced up at the sky, her eyes flashing the brightness of the sun for one moment.

“Can't help you there,” I said. “But if you're tired of being a weapon, I can help you with that.”

Spacegirl smiled. A real smile this time, not her killing smile.

“Go to sleep,” I told my fellow mercs, the pilot, Hannaday, anyone left alive within miles of us, in the voices of a million brilliant suns.

*   *   *

We hid the BJC jeep under a tarp I'd taken from the camp's fuel dump. The vehicle had gotten us into the mountains far to the south before running out of gas. The camp wasn't visible to the naked eye from here, but I'd spotted the Antonov beating its way into the morning sky, then northeast toward Ulan Bator.

Perhaps an hour later, a massive flight of helicopters came to salvage the American dead. While the big boys dusted off wreckage and bodies, Blackhawks chewed up a huge patch of desert where the camp must have been.

By noon, nothing remained but smoke, the spacegirl, and me.

We walked farther into the mountains, until my legs couldn't take it anymore. I found a hollow in one of the canyons and pitched a little tent.

“Come in with me,” I told her, “and let's dream of your home. We won't come back this time.”

She smiled.

The grenades I wired for our pillows were lumpy. Still fell asleep, her tight in my arms as any lover I'd ever had.

Somehow, I could smell Nichols's Paki horse turds even as spacegirl took my hand and led me across the clouds of a distant, brilliant heaven.

 

Angels i: The Houses of the Favored

I wrote this pentaptych of stories for a project with Bruce Holland Rogers. We never completed the project, but I was left with a lot of angels on my hands, which I eventually inflicted on editor Steve Jones. Since this book is about heaven, they seemed appropriate to include here.

I smell lamb's blood. Walking the dusty streets, sword in hand, I hear only silence. High, silver clouds sweep the moon's brightness like the linen wrapping a lover's face. These clouds are mine, the silence my shroud. There are tasks no one should be forced to do, not even by the loving hand of He Is Who He Is.

One of my brothers stands in a grove of olives and pomegranates, waving a flaming sword, occasionally killing snakes. A symbolic post, with little business to execute.

Others were sent to despoil virgins and lay waste to cities. Symbolism
and
execution, but at the end, they went home with their hands clean and consciences clear. Sinners live for punishment, after all.

But here is a city of a million beating hearts crowded together on the banks of their Father River, now sleeping. In my presence, the dogs are silent, the vultures huddled uneasily on temple roofs. Even the louche crocodiles doze among their muddy reeds.

Who He Is has charged me with vengeance. Not Eden's dangerous hungers, nor Sodom's hot sins. Here it is only for me to still the hearts of ten thousand sleeping sons, most of them innocent of any sin worse than craving the breast or a sweet, or perhaps a pretty girl.

My feet bring me to the stony regard of a jackal-headed god. “You, friend,” I whisper, “are at least honest in your falsehood. I wear Heaven's gleaming mantle as I set about my murders.”

A thin spray of dust trails from the jackal's muzzle as his smile cracks open a little wider.

Fang,
I tell myself, I am the tooth of God. He Is Who He Is, and it is I who will render flesh.

Honest acknowledgment is needed of the suffering that will arise with the morning sun. Suffering simply to make a point. Though the pain reaches my heart, I tear all my feathers loose to lay them at the jackal's feet, each great pinion radiant with holy power. The blood from my back I smear upon my face and hands, coat my sword, echo of the lamb's blood on the houses of the favored. Many and legion, I step into the darkest shadows to wound the hearts of ten thousand mothers.

Science and Other Fictions

 

The Starship Mechanic

WITH KEN SCHOLES

Ken and I sat in Borderlands Books in San Francisco and stunt-wrote in front of an audience. We each wrote half a story, then swapped manuscripts. Some people liked the results.

The floor of Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he'd been human. I'd thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he's just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.

When he discovered that the human race recorded our ideas in
books,
he'd been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn't actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.

Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn't conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving PhDs out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch's conversations with me.

He'd arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not
Brother from Another Planet
;
The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.

The subject's fallsacs when fully deployed serve as a tympanum, producing a rhythmic vibration at a frequency perceived by the human ear as a high-pitched shriek. Xenophysiological modeling has thus far failed to generate testable hypotheses concerning the volume of the sound produced. Some observers have speculated that the subject deployed technological assistance during atmospheric entry, though no evidence of this was found at the landing site, and subject has never indicated this was the case.

—Jude A. Feldman quoting Jen West Scholes,
A Reader's Guide to Earth's Only Living Spaceman,
Borderlands Books, 2014

It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn't mind. They'd had hairless cats around the place for years—a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn't all that different. Not in a science-fiction bookstore, at least.

Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to
fix
things.

This fixing often turned out to be not so good.

No technology was involved. Penauch's body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.

It was all the same to Penauch.

As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of
tool
. A Swiss army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth's alien shore.

And Penauch only spoke to me.

The question of Penauch's mental competence has bearing in both law and ethics. Pratt and Shaw (2013) have effectively argued that the alien fails the Turing test, both at a gross observational level and within the context of finer measurements of conversational intent and cooperation. Cashier (2014) claims an indirectly derived Stanford-Binet score in the 99th percentile, but seemingly contradicts herself by asserting that Penauch's sentience is at best an open question. Is he (or it) a machine, a person, or something else entirely?

—S. G. Browne, “A Literature Review of the Question of Alien Mentation,”
Journal of Exogenic Studies,
vol. II, no. 4, August 2015

The first time he fixed something was right after he'd landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53
P.M
. Pacific daylight time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Parnassus. Every window within six blocks shattered. Almost a hundred pedestrians and shoppers in the immediate area were treated for lacerations from broken glass, over two dozen more for damage to hearing and sinuses.

I got to him first, after stumbling out of Cole Hardware with a headache like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on me. Inside, we figured a bomb had gone off. The rising noise and the vibrating windows. All the vases in the homeware section had exploded. Luckily I'd been with the fasteners. The nails
sang,
but they didn't leap off the shelves and try to make hamburger of me.

Outside, there was this guy lying in a crater in the middle of the intersection, like Wile E. Coyote after he'd run out of Acme-patented jet fuel. I hurried over, touched his shoulder, and realized what a goddamned mess he was. Then half a dozen eyes opened, and something like a giant rigatoni farted before saying, “Penauch.”

Weird thing was, I could hear the spelling.

Though I didn't know it in that moment, my old life was over, my new one begun.

Penauch then looked at my shattered wristwatch, grabbed a handful of BMW windshield glass, sucked it down, and moments later fixed my timepiece.

For some value of “fixed.”

It still tells time, somewhere with a base seventeen counting system and twenty-eight-point-one-five-seven-hour day. It shows me the phases of Phobos and Deimos, evidence that he'd been on (or near) Mars. Took a while to figure that one out. And the thing that warbles whenever someone gets near me carrying more than about eight ounces of petroleum products. Including grocery bags, for example, and most plastics.

I could probably get millions for it on eBay. Penauch's first artifact, and one of less than a dozen in private hands.

The government owns him now, inasmuch as anyone owns Penauch. They can't keep him anywhere. He “fixes” his way out of any place he gets locked into. He comes back to San Francisco, finds me, and we go to the bookstore. Where Penauch polishes the floors and chases the hairless cats and draws pilgrims from all over the world to pray in Valencia Street. The city gave up on traffic control a long time ago. It's a pedestrian mall now when he's around.

The problem has always been, none of us have any idea what Penauch
is.
What he
does.
What he's
for
. I'm the only one he talks to, and most of what he says is Alice in Wonderland dialogue, except when it isn't. Two new semiconductor companies have been started through analysis of his babble, and an entire novel chemical feedstock process for converting biomass into plastics.

Then one day, down on the mirrored floor of Borderlands Books, Penauch looked at me and said quite clearly, “They're coming back.”

I was afraid we were about to get our answers.

It was raining men in the Castro, literally, and every single one of them was named Todd. Every single one of them wore a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts and Birkenstocks. Every single one of them landed on his back, flopped like a trout for a full minute, and leaped to his feet shouting one word: “Penauch!”

—
San Francisco Chronicle,
November 11, 2015, Gail Carriger reporting

“I must leave,” Penauch said, his voice heavy as he stroked a hairless cat on the freshly polished floor of the bookstore.

On a small TV in the back office of the store, an excited reporter in Milk Plaza spoke rapidly about the strange visitors who'd fallen from the sky. Hundreds of men named Todd, now scattered out into the city with one word on their tongues. As the news played in the background, I watched Penauch and could feel the sadness coming off of him in waves. “Where will you go?”

Penauch stood. “I don't know. Anywhere but here. Will you help me?”

The bell on the door jingled and a man entered the store. “Penauch,” he said.

I looked up at the visitor. His Hawaiian shirt was an orange that hurt my eyes, decorated in something that looked like cascading pineapples. He smiled and scowled at the same time.

Penauch moved quickly and suddenly the room smelled of ozone and cabbage.

The man, named Todd I assumed, was gone.

I looked at my alien, took in the slow wriggle of his pale and determined face. “What did you do?”

Penauch's clustered silver eyes leaked mercury tears. “I … un-fixed him.”

We ran out the back. We climbed into my car over on Guerrero. We drove north and away.