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    Our Lady of American Sorrows
    Our Lady of American Sorrows
    Our Lady of American Sorrows
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    Our Lady of American Sorrows

    By Jay Lake

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    About this ebook

    A novella of alternate history, nuclear threat and religion from award-winning speculative fiction writer Jay Lake. Mayan magic, Papal politics, and the grinding burdens of colonial life meet in this retelling of the Cuban missile crisis in a very different version of Central America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJay Lake
    Release dateMay 14, 2010
    ISBN9781452479378
    Our Lady of American Sorrows
    Author

    Jay Lake

    Jay Lake was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers' workshops he attended. His novels included Tor's publications Mainspring, Escapement, and Pinion, and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle - Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura. Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.

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      Book preview

      Our Lady of American Sorrows - Jay Lake

      Our Lady of American Sorrows

      by Jay Lake

      Smashwords Edition by Jay Lake

      Copyright © 2004, 2010 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

      Cover photograph copyright © 2007, 2010 Joseph E. Lake, Jr.

      Originally published as part of Jay Lake’s collection American Sorrows; 2004, Wheatland Press, Wilsonville, OR. This ebook text varies slightly from the original edition.

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Our Lady of American Sorrows

      by Jay Lake

      I sat with my friend Rodger — two months older and taller than me, but otherwise close as any twin brother — on the flat stone roof of my family’s house, second from the end of the row on the steepest block of Rondo Street. We were both sixteen, and this was our last summer of freedom before our final year at Latin School, before we had to work for our livings. The day was so hot it felt as if the sun itself reached down to press on my head.

      We shared our perch with a handful of iguanas and a pair of dusty-winged crows. We could see half the town, from the landing field along the river to east, back to the Civil Palace downtown. A series of open-topped trucks belched black smoke as they strained up the cobbles of Charles Avenue, coming from Ostia, New Albion’s little port at the river’s mouth. Four in three hours!

      Each was filled with straight-backed men in black cassocks, their dog collars visible like white slashes against their throats even from our distance. They all were heading for the monastery west of town — Our Lady of American Sorrows, a great fortress of a holy house inhabited only by solemn Cistercians.

      Until now. I sincerely doubted these were more Cistercian brothers come to call. Four trucks, I said. Perhaps a dozen priests in each.

      Rodger snickered. Are there enough souls in danger here in New Albion to need fifty new priests?

      No one needs fifty new priests, I replied darkly.

      Papa was a theist, which was legal in New Albion, sort of. Even though Mama had raised me well I found his skepticism daring. Last Sunday at Mass at St. Cipriano’s, Father Lavigne told us that Pope Louis-Charles III had sworn a renewed mission in the Americas when he had elevated the Archbishop of Teixeira. But fifty priests? If the Holy Office were coming to test the faith of our parishes, Papa would be in trouble.

      I tried to imagine another reason for the priests to be here, hoping to conjure some little word-magic to offset my newfound fear. Perhaps they are headed for the interior, to the native countries.

      Rodger’s snort was answer enough for that. Just you watch, he said. Something big is brewing.

      No more trucks appeared, and the next aeroplane wasn’t due until Friday, so after a while we got our fly rods and crickets to go fishing for bats off the seaside cliffs at sundown. The catch was always difficult, but they crisped so well on the fire, and tasted delicious with sea salt, lime and ground peppers.

      ‡

      New Albion sprawls across dusty hills that are almost never hidden from the sun. Despite what they say about us in Avignon and Londres, it does rain here, at least at certain hours of the day during certain times of the year. Our little country is known mostly for our heat and our cloudless summers, and beaches which stretch at the feet of pale cliffs two hours’ walk to the east.

      We were also known, I suppose, for our coffee. That plant grows in abundance, both wild and cultivated, in the high hills far to the west of town, where there is shade and rain drifts down from the distant mountains. Somehow God arranged it so we had neither ocean nor coffee ourselves here in New Albion proper, but were rather simply caught in the middle ground between the salt spray and the morning’s benediction.

      Papa had been working on a new kind of coffee mill ever since I could remember. He had a job as well, at the Ministry of Commercial Affairs down by the sluggish river in a high-windowed office that he sometimes took me to see. He sat under an old wicker-bladed fan that squealed to a slow tempo, stamping seals on forms after holding them in files for long periods of time. Since his mother was Brasilian, it was good that Papa had a civil service job — anyone with Brasilian connections had been under suspicion since the Second Great War.

      Another reason to fear the new priests.

      Papa went down to his office three or four days a week, stamped papers for a while, then counted the circling flies until the sweat beneath his collar drove him home again. The rest of the time he labored in the little workshop across the alley behind the block of whitewashed houses that included ours. Undershirt grimy with oil, Gauloise dangling from his lips, Papa sent sparks showering from his welder or patiently rewound electric motors. Somehow the heat did not bother Papa so much when he worked on his own projects.

      There were two very old coffee mills built into the slope of the hillside just south of Papa’s workshop, where the alley rises higher. Each was as big as a small house, with a door into the lower level. They still had mule troughs alongside their loading platforms, and hand pumps to bring the water up to the separator

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