"Steele, Allen - Zwarte Piet's Tale (v1.0) [html]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)-----------------------------------
A DF Books NERDs Release Copyright ©1998 by Allen M. Steele First published in Analog, December 1998
People often speak of Christmas as being a
season of miracles. Indeed, it sometimes seems that's all you hear
about during the holiday season; download the daily newsfeed, and
you're sure to find at least one doe-eyed story about a lost child
reunited with his parents, a stray pet finding his way home, a maglev
train that barely avoids colliding with another, a house burning down
without anyone being killed. These things can happen at any time, and
often do, but when they occur at Christmas, a special significance is
attached to them, as if an arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar
somehow has a magical portent. That sort of thing may go smooth on Earth,
but anyone on Mars who believes in miracles is the sort of person you
don't want to be with during a habitat blowout or a dust storm alert.
Belief in miracles implies belief in divine intervention, or luck at
the very least; that kind of attitude has killed more people out here
than anything else. Luck won't help you when a cell of your dome
undergoes explosive decompression, but having paid attention during
basic training will. I've known devoutly religious people who've died
because they panicked when a wall of sand came barrelling across the
plains, while atheists who kept their heads and sprinted to the nearest
shelter have survived. Four people returning to Wellstown from a water
survey were killed on Earth's Christmas Day back in m.y. 46, when the
driver of their rover rolled the vehicle down a twenty-meter
embankment; there was no yuletide miracle for them. I'm sorry if this may seem cynical, but
that's the way it is. Almost a million aresians now live on Mars, and
we didn't face down this cold red world by believing in Santa Claus.
Luck is something you make for yourself; miracles occur when you get
extra-lucky. I've been here for over twenty years now, and I've never
seen it work differently, whether it be on Christmas, Yom Kippur, or
First Landing Day. Yet still ... there's always an exception. * * * * Sure, we celebrate Christmas on Mars. We
just don't do it the same way as on Earth. The first thing you have to remember is
that we count the days a bit differently. Having 39.6 more minutes each
day, and 669 days—or sols, as we call ‘em—in a sidereal period, meant
that aresians threw out both Greenwich Mean Time and the Gregorian
calendar in a.d. 2032, long before the Pax Astra took control of the
near-space colonies, way before Mars declared its independence. The
Zubrin calendar has twelve months, ranging from 48 to 66 sols in
length, each named after a Zodiac constellation; it retroactively began
on January 1, 1961, which became Gemini 1, m.y. 1 by local reckoning.
The conversion factors from Gregorian to Zubrin calendars are fairly
complex, so don't ask for an explanation here, except to say that one
of the first things newcomers from Earth have to realize is that April
Fool pranks are even less funny at Arsia Station than they were back in
Indiana. Indeed, aresians pretty much did away with
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, and virtually
every other Earth holiday. Our New Year's is out of whack with the rest
of the solar system, and instead of Columbus Day we have First Landing;
when Mars seceded from the Pax Astra in 2066, or m.y. 57, we began
commemorating the event with our own Independence Day. A few religious
holidays continue to be observed at the same time as they are on Earth.
West Bank, the small Jewish settlement on the western slope of the
Tharsis bulge, celebrates hanukkah in accordance with the traditional
Hebrew calendar; I was once there for the third night of hanukkah, and
watched as the family with whom I was staying lit its menorah when the
colony's DNAI calculated the sun had set in Jerusalem. Christmas has been imported as well, yet
because the aresian year was nearly twice as long as Earth's, it comes
around half as often. The first colonists tried having their Christmas
promptly on December 25th, but it felt odd to be celebrating Christmas
twice a year, sometimes in the middle of the Martian summer. When the
colonies formally adopted the Zubrin calendar in m.y. 38, it was
decided that the aresian Christmas would fall only once every two Earth
years; this meant that we had to devise our own way of observing the
holiday. So instead of designating one single sol in Taurus as being
Christmas Day, aresians picked the second week of the month as
Christmas Week, beginning on Ta. 6 and continuing through Ta.13; it was
roughly adapted from the Dutch tradition of observing December 6 as the
Feast of St. Nicholas. During that week, everyone would take a break
from all but the most essential labor, and this would give families and
clans a chance to get together and exchange gifts. Devout Christians
who wished to continue unofficially observing December 25 as Jesus's
birthday were welcome to do so—New Chattanooga and Wellstown took two
sols off each aresian year for a terran-style Christmas—but it wasn't
marked on the Zubrin calendar. Most of the original Seven Colonies, with
the exception of West Bank, accepted Christmas Week as a respite from
the hard work of settling the Martian frontier. As more immigrants from
Earth and the Moon began establishing new colonies along the eastern
equator, they adopted Christmas Week as well. Yet, as time went on, the
aresian Christmas began to lose much of its original meaning. Indeed, as some noted, the week never had
that much meaning to begin with. Since it wasn't held to celebrate of
the birth of Christ, it had little religious significance. Families and
clans tended to live in the same colonies, often sharing the same
quarters, so there wasn't much point in setting aside an entire week
for them to get together. These colonists lived on the verge of
poverty; Pax trade tariffs and the enormous cost of importing items
from Earth made Christmas presents beyond the reach of most people, and
giving someone a new helmet liner is hardly the stuff of romance. So
what usually happened during Christmas Week was that people congregated
in taprooms to get ripped on homebrew and hempweed; when the taprooms
closed, louts roamed the corridors looking for trouble. By mid-century,
Christmas Week had degenerated into debauchery, random violence, and
the occasional fatal accident. It wasn't a lot of fun. Worse yet was the fact that the first
generation of aresians to be born on Mars was growing up with only
second-hand knowledge of what Christmas was supposed to be like. They'd
read old microfiche stories about Rudolph and Santa Claus, the Grinch
and Scrooge, or watch disks of ancient films like It's A Wonderful
Life and Frosty the Snowman, and then go to their parents
asking why Santa didn't drop down their chimney to leave wrapped and
ribboned gifts beneath a tree strung with lights and tiny ornaments.
Perhaps you can successfully explain to a four-year-old why there
aren't any reindeer and Douglas firs on Mars, or even point out that
your two-room apartment doesn't have a hearth, let alone a chimney ...
but try telling a small child that there's no such person as Santa. Mars was in desperate need of a St.
Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In m.y. 52, he arrived in
the form of Dr. Johann Spanjaard. * * * * Despite the fact that I'm one of the few
people on Mars who knew him well, there's very little I can tell you
about Doc Spanjaard. That's not much a surprise, though; folks came
here for many different reasons, and not always the best ones.
Frontiers tend to attract people who didn't quite fit in the places
they came from, and on Mars it's impolite to ask someone about their
past if they don't voluntarily offer that information themselves. Some
aresians will blabber all day about their home towns or their old job,
but others I've known for twenty years and still don't know where they
were born, or even their real names. Johann Spanjaard fell somewhere between
these extremes. He was born in Holland, but I don't know when: around
a.d. 2030 is my best guess, since he appeared to be in his early
forties when he arrived at Arsia Station. He was trained as a
paramedic, and briefly worked on Clarke County; and later at Descartes
Station. He was a Moon War vet; he told me that he witnessed the Battle
of Mare Tranquillitatis, but if he had any combat medals he never
showed them to me. He returned to Earth, stayed there a little while,
left again to take a short job as a beltship doctor, then finally
immigrated to Mars. There were at least two women in his past—Anja, his
first wife, and Sarah, his second—but he seldom spoke of them, although
he sent them occasional letters. No children. In hindsight, that may be the
most significant fact of all: even after marrying and leaving two
wives, Doc didn't have any kids. Save that thought. Doc Spanjaard immigrated to Mars in m.y.
52, five aresian years before the colonies broke away from Pax. By then
Arsia Station had become the largest colony; nearly a hundred thousand
people lived in reasonable comfort within the buckydomes and
underground malls that had grown up around the base camp of the
original American expedition, just south of the Noctis Labyrinthis
where, on a nice clear day, you could just make out the massive
volcanic cone of Arsia Mons looming over the western horizon. The
colony had finally expanded its overcrowded infirmary into a
full-fledged hospital, and Doc was one of the people hired to staff its
new emergency ward. I came to know Doc because of my job as an
airship pilot. One of Arsia General's missions was providing medical
airlifts to our six neighbor colonies in the western hemisphere;
although they had infirmaries of their own, none possessed Arsia
General's staff or equipment. The hospital had contracted my employer,
AeroMars, to fly doctors out to these remote settlements and, on
occasion, bring back patients for treatment. Within two sols of Doc's
arrival at Arsia General, I flew him over the Valles Marineris to
Wellstown so he could treat a burn victim from an explosion at the fuel
depot. We ended up hauling the poor guy back to Arsia Station that same
day; the sortie lasted twenty-seven hours, coming and going, and when
it was over we were too wired to go to bed, so we wandered over to the
Mars Hotel and had a few beers. That trip established a regular pattern
for us: fly out, do what had to be done, fly back, hand the case over
to the ER staff, then head to the nearest taproom to decompress.
However, I seldom saw Doc Spanjaard get loaded; three beers was his
limit, and he never touched hard liquor. Which was fine with me; I'm a
featherweight drinker myself, and two beers was the most I'd allow
myself because I never knew when I'd get beeped to drag Miss Thuvia
back into the sky again. But the three of us logged a lot of klicks
together; once I had the princess tied down in her hangar and Doc had
washed someone else's blood off his hands, we'd park our rumps in a
quiet bar and tap mugs for a job well done. We were a mutt-'n-jeff team if there ever
was one. Doc was tall and preposterously skinny, with solemn blue eyes
and fair skin that helmet burn had freckled around his trim white
beard; imagine an underfed St. Nicholas and you've got it down. I was
the short, dumpy black sidekick from Tycho City who had a thing for
Burroughs classics and loved old Eddie Murphy movies even though I had
never spent more than two weeks on Earth (what can I say? he made me
laugh). But Doc had a wry sense of humor that most people didn't see,
and I was the only airlift pilot who wouldn't panic when he had to
perform a emergency tracheotomy at twelve hundred meters with a utility
knife and a pen. We saw a lot of action over the course of
the next nine months; by my count, we saved at least thirty lives and
lost only four. Not bad for two guys whose biggest complaint was losing
a lot of sleep. The Martian Chronicle caught wind of our act
and wanted to do a story on us. We talked it over during a ride back
from Sagan, then radioed back to Arsia General and arranged for the
reporter to meet us at the Mars Hotel after we got home. The reporter
was there, along with his photographer and one of Doc's former
patients, a sweet young thing from West Bank whose heart was still
beating again due to Doc's ministrations and my flying skills, but gee
gosh, we forgot where we were supposed to meet them and went to Lucky
Pierre's instead. Two more missed interviews, followed by profuse
apologies and sworn promises that we'd be at the right place next time,
went by before the Chronicle finally got the message. On Mars,
the phrase “mind your own business” is taken seriously, even by the
press. But it wasn't always funny stuff. Our job
took us places you'd never want to see, the settlements established
along the equatorial zone surrounding the Valles Marineris. Over forty
Earth years had elapsed since First Landing, and humankind had made
substantial footholds on this big red planet, yet beyond the safe, warm
confines of Arsia Station life could be pretty grim. New Chattanooga
was infested with sandbugs, the seemingly indestructible mites which
lived in the permafrost and homed in on any aquifer large enough for
them to lay eggs; the colony's water tanks were literally swimming with
them, and despite the best filtration efforts they were in every cup of
coffee you drank and every sponge-bath you took. DaVinci was populated
by neocommunists who, despising bourgeois culture and
counterrevolutionary influences, wanted little to do with the rest of
the colonies, and therefore turned down most aid offered by Arsia
Station. Their subsurface warrens were cold and dimly-lit, their
denizens hard-eyed and ready to quote Mao Tse Tung as soon as you
entered the airlock. Viking, the northernmost settlement, was located
on the Chryse Planitia near the Viking I landing site: two hundred
people huddled together in buckydomes while eking out the most
precarious of existences, and every time we visited them, the
population had grown a little smaller. And people spoke only in hushed
tones about Ascension, the settlement near Sagan just south of the
Valles Marineris that had been founded by religious zealots; living in
self-enforced isolation, running short of food and water, finally cut
off from the neighboring colonies by the planetwide dust storm of m.y.
47, its inhabitants began murdering one another, then cannibalizing the
corpses. Doc and I saw a side of the Martian
frontier that most people on Earth didn't even know existed:
hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or
malfunctioning equipment, psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what
we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our sorrows in homemade
brew. There's many wonderful things about Mars, but it's not Earth or
even the Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it
doesn't kill outright, it conspires to drive insane. Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy
ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what
we missed about Christmas. * * * * It was the third week of Aries, m.y. 53.
Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the taprooms
were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just
returned from delivering medical supplies to the poor schmucks at
Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some discarded
fiberoptics over the bar. “I miss mistletoe,” I murmured. I was
working on my second beer by then, so I wasn't conscious of my
alliteration. “Mistletoe and Christmas trees.” “You don't know mistletoe and Christmas
trees,” Doc said. “Sure do. Had them in my family's
apartment. My mother and father, they used to kiss beneath the...” “You grew up on the Moon. You had vinyl
mistletoe and plastic Christmas trees. Bet you've never smelled the
real thing.” “No, but it was close enough.” “Not in the slightest. You'd know the
difference.” Doc sipped his beer. “But I get the point. Out in the
belt, we'd get together in the wardroom on Christmas Eve and sing
carols. You know caroling...?” “Sure. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘The First Day of
Christmas,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock'...” “'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,’ that's
my favorite. And then we'd exchange gifts. Sarah gave me a ring with a
little piece of gold from an asteroid ore our ship had refined.” He
smiled at the memory. “Marriage didn't last, but I held onto the ring.” “My favorite was a little rocket from my
Dad. I was eight ... nine, I guess. He made it for me in his lab. About
two meters long, with a hollow nose cone. We put a little note with our
squid number in the cone, then went EVA and hiked up to the crater rim,
set the trajectory, fueled it up and fired it at Earth.” Once again, I
remembered that little rocket's silent launch, and how it lanced
straight up into the black sky over Tycho. “Dad told me that it would
eventually get there and land somewhere, and maybe someone would find
it and send back a letter.” “Anyone ever fax you?” “Naw. It probably never got to Earth ...
or if it did, it probably burned up on entry.” I shrugged. “But I like
to think that it made the trip, and just landed some place where no one
ever found it.” “But it meant something, didn't it? Like
Sarah's ring. No Christmas gift is ever insignificant. There's always a
little of your soul in whatever you give someone.” Doc scowled at the
lights being strung above the bar. “Here, it's just an excuse for
people to get drunk and stupid, and the next day everyone has to
apologize to each other. Sorry for banging on your door. Sorry for
keeping you awake last night. Sorry for making a pass at your wife...” “What do you expect? Rudolph the
green-nosed reindeer?” “Red. Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer. Don't they teach you selenians anything?” “Oh, yeah. Red-nosed reindeer.” I polished
off my second and last, shoved the mug across the bar. “Yeah, I know,
but all that Santa stuff doesn't make a lot of sense out here, y'know?” “It doesn't? Why shouldn't it?” I could tell that he was spoiling for a
fight. “Aw, c'mon, Doc ... does this look like Earth to you? Cheststuff
smoking on an open fire, jackass stepping on your toes...” “You can't even get the lyrics right!
‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your
toes...'” “What's a chestnut?” “Never mind.” He turned away from me.
“Jeff, I'll have another one. Put it on his tab.” I didn't object. Doc was in a
self-righteous mood; when he was this way, silence was the only way you
could deal with him. I helped myself to some fried algae from the bowl
the bartender had placed between us while I waited for him to calm down. “I guess what I miss the most,” he finally
said, “is the look ... no, not just the look, the glow ...
children have on Christmas morning. Until I came here, I'd never seen a
kid who didn't think it was the best day of the year. Even out in the
belt, it was something they could look forward to. But here...” “I know what you mean.” My gaze wandered
to the line of ceramic liquor bottles lined up on the shelf. “The best
some of them can hope for is that their folks won't be too hung over to
make breakfast for them. I mean, some people try to do better, but ...
I dunno, something's missing.” “I'll tell you what's missing” Doc tapped
his finger against the bartop. “It isn't just trees or presents. Magic,
that's missing. There's no Sinterklass.” “Yeah. No Santa Claus.” “Did I say Santa Claus? I didn't say Santa
Claus. I said Sinterklass.” “There's a difference?” For a moment, I thought he was going to
brain me with his beer mug. “Hell, yes, there's a difference!
Sinterklass arrives in Holland on a ship from Spain. He's a tall,
slender gent with a long white beard who wears a red robe and bishop's
minter. He rides into town on a white horse with his assistant Zwarte
Piet, where he gives presents to all the good children on his list.
Then he ... what's so damn funny?” “That's Santa Claus, you quack! Only the
details are different! Reindeer, elves, a sleigh from the North Pole
... it's still the same mook, right down to the extortion racket.” “True, but Sinterklass came first ... or
St. Nicholas, if we want to call him by his proper name.” He swigged
his beer. “He was brought to America by the Dutch, but just like
everything else brought over from Europe, he was changed until
virtually no one remembered his origins.” “Tell me about it. Same thing happened to
my African ancestors ... although not by choice.” “Then you'd appreciate the similarity
between Santa's elves and Zwarte Piet. It means Black Peter ... he's a
Moor.” I shrugged. “Sounds like a demotion. My
great-grandfather used to play Santa every Christmas at a shopping
mall. There weren't many of them black Santas back then, I'm told.” “Your grandfather played Santa Claus?” He
raised an eyebrow. “Now there's a coincidence. My father played
Sinterklass in our village, as did my grandfather.” “No kidding?” “Goes with the genes.” He stroked his trim
white beard. “Men in my family have the right whiskers for the job. All
we have to do is let our beard grow out and...” He stopped just then. To this day, I'll
never forget his slack-jawed expression as he stared at me in
wonderment. He had just spoken of the glow that children have on
Christmas morning; in that instant, I saw something like that appear in
his own face. Wonder and joy, wonder and joy; tidings of wonder and joy
... I don't believe in telepathy any more than I do in Santa Claus, yet
I suddenly knew exactly what he was thinking. “Oh, no, you don't,” I said, turning to
hop off the stool and book out of there. “Don't even think for a
minute...” “Oh, shut up and sit down.” Doc grabbed my
wrist before I could make it to the door. “Let's see if we can work
this out.” Against my better judgement, I stayed. Doc
finished his beer, and then we switched to coffee, and by the end of
the evening I had a new name. * * * * Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet live in the
caldera of Olympus Mons, within an invisible buckydome which contains
their secret toyshop. When they're not making toys or teaching sandbugs
to perform tricks for their flea circus, they watch all the boys and
girls of Mars through magic telescopes that can peer through walls,
putting together a long list of who's been naughty and who's been nice. Then, on the first sol of Christmas Week,
they load their gifts aboard their airship, climb aboard, and fly away
from Olympus Mons. Over the next seven sols they visit the colonies one
by one, stopping at each to distribute presents to the good children of
Mars. They may stay overnight at a settlement, because sometimes Black
Peter gets too tired to fly St. Nicholas to the next colony, but if
they do stay, the children should try to leave the pair alone, or next
Christmas they may find the boots of their skinsuits filled with sand
instead of candy. That's the story that we artfully
disseminated through the Marsnet. It was posted on all the usual sites
kids would mouse, plus a few that their parents would find. It isn't
hard to create a myth, if know what you're doing, but Doc and I didn't
do it all by ourselves, and not without running into a little trouble. Arsia Station's board of selectmen were
skeptical when we formally pitched the idea to them at the next weekly
meeting. They thought Doc and I had dreamed this up as a sneaky way of
earning overtime until Doc explained that we would also be transporting
food, medical supplies, and replacement parts to the settlements. Not
only that, but since we would be hitting each settlement in turn, we
could take stuff from one place to another, in much the same way supply
caravans presently operated, yet in a shorter time-span and for more
charitable reasons. The selectmen were all too aware of the ill-will
some of the smaller settlements felt toward Arsia; our plan would make
for good colonial relationships. So they found a few extra megalox in
the budget to fund an extended medical sortie, not the least of which
was subcontracting Miss Thuvia from AeroMars for a seven-sol
sortie. When we contacted the other five colonies
and informed them of our proposal, we received mixed reactions.
Wellstown, Sagan, Viking, and New Chattanooga were mystified by the
notion of a Martian Santa, but otherwise interested, albeit not wildly
enthusiastic; if anything, it meant they would be receiving a
previously unscheduled visit from Arsia General, and a few freebies to
boot. West Bank was initially cool to the idea—they didn't observe
Christmas Week, after all—until we agreed to knock off the Sinterklass
routine and perform as if it was just another airlift. But DaVinci was
the aresian home of Ebenezer Scrooge; after a few days of stone
silence, we received a terse fax from its Proletariat, stating that the
free people of DaVinci had decided to reject St. Nicholas was an
archaic symbol of capitalistic society and Black Peter as a shameful
hold-over of racist imperialism. Well, tough boots: no candy for the
commies. Most people went for it, though, and once
word leaked out about what Doc and I intended to do, we received
assistance from various individuals, sometimes without us soliciting
them for help. Aresians have a strong tradition of looking out for the
other guy, after all, and the citizens of Arsia Station came out for
us. A textile shop volunteered to make toys for us: tiny Mars landers,
statuettes of men in skinsuits, some inflatable replicas of Miss
Thuvia. A food-processing firm turned out several kilos of hard
candy; it looked weird and tasted the same, or at least so I thought,
but Doc field-tested samples on kids passing through the ER ward and
none of them spit it out. A lady I was dating from Data One hacked out
a game pak which she stored on a handful of spare disks; one of them
was a little hide-and-seek involving Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet
chasing each other through a three-dimensional maze. She made sure that
the odds of Black Peter winning the match were always in my character's
favor, something which Doc resented when he tried playing it. Yet the best efforts were those on behalf
of our skinsuits. It wouldn't do for us to cycle through airlocks
looking like any other dust-caked aresian coming in from the cold.
Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet were magical, after all; we had to look the
part. So we hired Uncle Sal, Arsia's premier skinsuit tailor, to come
up with some hempcloth overgarments which closely mimicked the
traditional costumes worn in the Netherlands. Doc's outfit was bright
red and white, with a long scarlet cape whose ribbed hood, when pulled
over his helmet, looked much like a bishop's minter. My costume was
dark blue, with a plumed white collar around the neck and puffed-out
sleeves and leggings. To add to the effect, Sal weaved colored
microfilaments through the garments; when we switched them on, we
looked like walking Christmas trees. The only problem we had was with Doc's
beard. He stopped trimming it once our plan was approved, and within a
couple of weeks it flowed down his face like a pale waterfall. It
looked terrific and his girlfriends loved running their fingers through
it, but he had the damnedest time tucking it into his helmet. He
finally figured out what that hearty “ho-ho-ho” business was all about;
it allowed him to spit out the whiskers in his mouth. Altogether, it was an impressive effort,
doubly so by the fact that we pulled it all together in less than three
weeks. On Ta. 6, m.y. 53, Doc and I climbed aboard Miss Thuvia
and set sail from Arsia Station. The blimp had been temporarily
festooned with multicolored lights. I turned them on as soon as we were
clear of the hangar, and watched from the gondola windows as a small
crowd of aresians waved us farewell. It was a good beginning, but our first
stop, at twilight on the first day of the tour, was a bust. West Bank
didn't want anything to do with Christmas, so I kept the lights turned
off when we approached the settlement on the western slope of the
Tharsis volcano range, and we weren't wearing our outfits when we
exited the blimp's airlock. The settlers were cordial enough; we handed
out sweets and toys to the handful of kids we met inside, and once
their folks unloaded the supplies they had requested—which wasn't much,
because West Bank took pride in its self-sufficiency—we had a meal and
a glass of wine in the commissary before we were shown the way to the
hostel. Nothing lost, but nothing really gained either, save for fuel
and a night's rest; by dawn the next morning we were airborne again.
The only thing which made the trip worthwhile was seeing the sunrise
over Pavonis Mons as we flew eastward toward the upper edge of the
Noctis Labyrinthis. That was the longest leg of the journey.
Over a thousand klicks lay between West Bank and Wellstown, and
although Doc stood watch in the cockpit while I bunked out for a couple
of hours, I did little more than doze. Questions ran through my mind
even while my eyes were shut, murmuring like the incessant drone of Miss
Thuvia's props. What were we doing, two grown men dressing up like
the Dutch Santa and his Moorish apprentice? I could be home now, trying
to find an unattached lady with whom I could share some holiday cheer.
What were we trying to achieve here? The children at West Bank had
shown only slight interest in us; a little girl had stoically gazed at
the toy lander Doc placed in her hand, and a small boy had made a sour
face when he ate the candy I had given him. Yeah, so maybe Christmas
wasn't part of their culture, but the Jewish friends with whom I had
been raised on the Moon knew what it was, if only for the spirit of the
season. Perhaps Christmas didn't belong on Mars. So why did any of this
matter? When I finally got up and went forward, I
could see that Doc had been contemplating the same thought. “It'll go
better in Wellstown,” he said softly, but I don't think he believed it
either. We ate cold rations as the sun went down
behind us, drank some more powdered coffee, and said very little to one
another until the lights of Wellstown appeared before us, a tiny
cluster of white and amber lights against the cold darkness of the
Martian night. Almost reluctantly, we pulled on our skinsuits; I almost
forgot to switch Miss Thuvia's Christmas lights until we were
above the landing field. A handful of men grabbed our mooring
lines, dragged us in, tied us down. It was only the second time we had
worn our costumes on EVA; Doc stepped on his cape and nearly fell down
the gangway, and the puffed-out legging of my suit forced me into a
bow-legged gait. We looked stupid as we made our way to the airlock of
the nearest buckydome. The final touch came when Doc couldn't fit
inside, and he had to lower the peaked hood of his cape. The outer hatch shut behind us; we got a
chance to study each other as the airlock cycled. Two fools in gaudy,
luminescent skinsuits. A bad dream come to life. We had been flying for
the past twelve hours, but I would have gladly flown straight home if I
thought it would save me any further humiliation. Why did I ever let
Doc talk me into...? Then the green light flashed above the
inner hatch. Doc and I were unclasping our helmets when the lockwheel
began turning its own, then the inner hatch was thrown open from
outside. Bright light rushed into the airlock, and along with it, the
excited squeals of the dozens of children waiting outside. At that instant, it all made perfect sense. * * * * Even after all these years, I still
consider that first Christmas tour to be our best. We ran short of
candy and toys before we were through, and we were bone-tired by the
time we left Sagan for the last leg of the circuit back to Arsia
Station, yet we brought home with us the most exciting discovery since
microfossils were found in the Noctis Labyrinthis. St. Nicholas was alive and well and living
on Mars. How could nearly three hundred kids possibly be wrong? Sometimes it was tough. The children at
Viking broke our hearts: grimy, hungry, wearing cast-off clothes, but
enchanted the moment we stepped through the airlock. None rejected our
awful candy, and they fought jealously over the crude toys from Doc's
bag until we made sure that everyone had something to take home. They
took turns sitting in Sinterklass's lap, and he listened to stories of
hardship and loss that would have horrified the worst curmudgeon.
Several kids were sallow and feverish with lingering illnesses that
required Doc to play physician as well as holiday saint; we were
prepared for that, so after a sneaky sort of examination ("How long is
your tongue? I bet you've got the longest one here. Open your mouth and
let Sinterklass see. Oh, yes, you do, don't you...?") he'd send the
sick ones over to Black Peter for a card trick and a couple of pills;
later, we'd give the rest of the prescription to their parents. Sometimes it was funny. A little girl in
New Chattanooga was adamant in her outspoken belief that Sinterklass
was a fake; the brat kept yanking at Doc's beard, tearing out white
hair by its roots in her dogged attempt to dislodge his mask. She got
candy and a toy—no child came away empty-handed during that first
tour—but before we left the following morning I tracked down her
skinsuit in the community ready-room and filled her boots with handfuls
of sand. She was much nicer to us the next year. Sagan's resident
nymphomaniac decided that the holiday season wasn't complete until, in
her words, she had “made Santa's bells jingle.” She started by sitting
in his lap and whispering something in Doc's ear that succeeded in
turning his nose bright red. At any other time, Doc might have obliged,
once they were safely away from the little ones, but he decided that
this might set a bad precedent. To her credit, she took his refusal
with good grace ... and then she asked me why I was called Black Peter. And, yeah, sometimes it was scary. A slow
leak in one of her hydrogen cells caused Miss Thuvia to lose
altitude as we were flying from Viking to New Chattanooga. The pressure
drop occurred while we were flying over Cupri Chasm, one of the deepest
parts of the Valles Marineris; for a few minutes, it looked as if we
would crash in the red-rock canyon dozens of kilometers below us. I
awoke Doc from his nap and he scrambled into the gondola's rear to open
the ballast valves. When that wasn't enough, he shoved some cargo
containers out the airlock—including, much to our regret, one
containing several bottles of homemade wine we were freighting from
Wellstown to the other colonies. We jettisoned enough weight from the
princess to keep her aloft just long enough to clear the chasm, but she
left skid marks when she landed at New Chattanooga. And then we had to
put on our costumes and pretend that we hadn't just cheated death by
only a few kilos. But it was fun, and it was exhilarating,
and it was heart-warming, and it was good. Even before we
arrived back at Arsia Station, where we were greeted not by the small
handful who had witnessed our departure a week earlier but by hundreds
of skinsuited colonists who surrounded the crater and threw up their
arms as Miss Thuvia came into sight, Doc and I swore to one
another that we'd make the same trip again next year. It wasn't because our newfound fame—we
still ducked the Martian Chronicle when it came to us for an
interview—or the lure of adventure, or even another shot at our cuddly
friend in Sagan. It was simply because we'd brought something pure,
decent and civilized to Mars. Perhaps that was a Christmas miracle in
itself. If so, then we wanted another one, and another one after that. We'd eventually receive our miracle. But
it wasn't one I would have ever expected. * * * * In 2066, the Pax Astra underwent a
political upheaval when the Monarchists overthrew the ruling New Ark
Party on the Clarke County space colony near Earth. The coup d'etat was
led by former New Ark members frustrated with the economic stagnation
brought on by the Pax's government by consensus. They formed an
opposition party with the intent of recasting the Pax Astra as a
democratic monarchy, and eventually deposed the New Ark in a
near-bloodless revolution. Yet shortly after Queen Macedonia had been
crowned, the aresian representatives to the new Parliament realized
that Martian interests were a very low priority in the new order. The
diplomats caught the next cycleship home; no sooner had they arrived at
Arsia Station that they formally announced that Mars was seceding from
the Pax Astra and that its colonies were declaring political
independence. This was the beginning of the great
Martian immigration. Within a year, our world began receiving the first
shiploads of refugees from the Pax. Most were New Ark loyalists who had
quickly discovered that Monarchist democracy was restricted to those
who supported the royal agenda, which mainly involved keeping itself in
power and persecuting anyone who objected. Since the Moon was part of
the Pax and life on Earth was intolerable to those who had been born in
low-gee environments, Mars became their only sanctuary. But we hadn't built a Statue of Liberty
anywhere on our planet, and even Arsia Station was ill-equipped to
handle the dozens, then hundreds, of refugees—drybacks, you want to use
the impolite term—who came to us during the long winter of m.y. 57.
Human survival on Mars has always been a frail and precarious matter;
even with mandatory water rationing and voluntary birth control, the
six colonies were unable to support everyone from the Pax who wanted to
move here. Ascension was reopened and West Bank relaxed its standards
to admit non-Jewish immigrants; when their resources were exhausted,
the colonies sent messages to the Pax pleading for it to stop sending
more bodies our way. Yet the Monarchists turned a deaf ear to us; since
Mars was no longer within the Queen's domain, it was a convenient
dumping ground for its dissidents, low-lifes, and criminals. When its
escapees began to include people they wanted to keep to themselves,
they revoked exit visas and began searching outbound vessels. But they
couldn't stop everyone from leaving, and it was a rare week when the
contrail of another lander wasn't spotted streaking across our pink
skies. Some of the newcomers came equipped to
establish new settlements; this was how we got Nova America in the
Solis Planum south of Arsia Station, Graceland in the Margaritifer
northeast of New Chattanooga, and Thankgod up on southern edge of the
Acidalia Plantia. Others arrived with little more than a second-rate
skinsuit and a handful of useless Pax lox that the Mars colonies had
stopped accepting as hard currency. They often came down in cramped
landers stripped of all but the most essential hardware. Many arrived
safely; one way or another, they managed to survive, even prosper. A
few crashed in remote areas. Decades later, explorers were still
finding their remains: sad and lonesome skeletons, desiccated by dust
storms, half-buried within cold red drifts. As the month of Taurus rolled around once
more, Doc and I found little free time to prepare for Christmas Week. I
had received paramedic training by then, so I could assist Doc when we
flew out on a sortie; good thing, too, because Arsia General's
resources were stretched to the limit. Besides the fact that many
immigrants had sustained injuries during landing, just as many had
become ill during their long flight from near-space. Radiation
sickness, calcium deficiency, dysentery, bronchitis, malnutrition,
Tibbet's disease, a half-dozen different strains of influenza ... you
name it, they had it. We had already logged sixteen hundred hours
aboard Miss Thuvia by Christmas, and were seldom seen in the
bars at Arsia Station. Yet just because the colonies were in
crisis didn't mean that Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet got a break.
Indeed, their presence was needed more than ever before; the children
whom we had visited during our first tour were now teenagers and young
adults, but their ranks had been filled by yet more kids, many of whom
were toddlers born on Clarke County and the Moon. Uprooted from their
homes by the Monarchist revolution, bewildered and frightened by their
harsh new environment, some sick, most living in awful poverty, they
needed Christmas just as much as they needed air, food, and medicine. Our annual Christmas tour had become a
major part of aresian life by now. The West Bank elders finally decided
that a little gentile culture wasn't such a bad thing after all, so
they allowed us to wear our costumes when we came to call, and since
DaVinci's socialist government had crumbled a couple of years earlier,
St. Nicholas and Black Peter were now welcome as the next stop after
Viking. Along with the revived Ascension colony and three new
settlements, the tour now had nine stops, not including our home port
at Arsia Station. This meant that Doc and I spent the entire
holiday week on the road, sometimes making two stops a day.
Fortunately, the older colonies had learned to not depend upon Arsia
Station to make the holiday season for them; as well as offering room
and board if we stayed overnight and refuel Miss Thuvia when
she touched down, they began making gifts of their own for their
neighbor settlements. Since Miss Thuvia has a limited payload
capacity, and therefore couldn't haul thousands of kilos of Christmas
presents from one settlement to another, a rather clever system of
gift-giving had been devised: each colony gave presents to the next
settlement on our route. Arsia Station gave to West Bank, West Bank to
Wellstown, Wellstown to Viking, Viking to DaVinci, and so forth. Every
other year, Doc and I reversed the schedule so that DaVinci gave stuff
to Viking, etc. And the gifts themselves ranged from the simple to the
elaborate; West Bank made wonderful handcrafted dreidels that spun
forever, Wellstown could be depended on to supply excellent wine,
DaVinci distributed illustrated chapbooks of poetry and short stories,
Viking's artists contributed tiny yet endlessly fascinating sand
paintings, and Sagan's gliders could fly for almost a quarter-klick.
And, of course, Arsia Station continued to send candy and small toys to
every child who wanted one. The new settlements were still too
impoverished to spend the time or energy to making gifts of their own,
though, so I sent email to representatives at each of the older
colonies, telling them that Black Peter would be reserving a little
extra cargo space aboard Sinterklass's magic dirigible for gifts to
Ascension, Nova America, Graceland, and Thankgod. No one objected to
the deviation from standard operating procedure, and we were promised
extra goodies from everyone when Miss Thuvia lifted off from
Arsia on Sag. 6. For the past four years, the Christmas
tour had been blessed with good flying weather. Our luck couldn't last
forever, though; by the time we arrived at DaVinci, Marsnet had posted
nowcasts of a severe dust storm developing in the Amazonis Plantia, due
west of the Tharsis Montes range. West Bank, which we had left only
eighteen hours earlier, was already reporting high winds. They warned
us that Miss Thuvia wouldn't be able to handle the storm, and
suggested that we deflate our craft and hunker down at DaVinci until
the worst was over. That might be good advice at any other
time, but during Christmas Week it posed a real problem. Dust storms
have been known to last for days or weeks, even months on certain
historic occasions. If Doc and I chose to ride out the storm in
DaVinci, we might be celebrating New Year's there. About two dozen
immigrants in Thankgod were barely holding out in shelters little more
sophisticated than those built by the First Landers; they were in dire
need of the food, water, and medicine aboard Miss Thuvia. And
we quietly regarded DaVinci was our least favorite of stopovers; we
hadn't forgotten the snubbing we'd received during our first tour, and
more than a few hard-line neocommies still hadn't warmed up to us. We managed to get the station manager to
loan us a long-range rover. It was about six hundred and fifty klicks
from DaVinci to Thankgod, but since the rover burned methane/oxygen and
carbon dioxide, it was capable of manufacturing its own fuel from the
atmosphere and from recaptured water vapor from the condensers, and
ditto for cabin air. Using the rover would be slower than taking the
blimp, but flying Miss Thuvia in this sort of weather was out of the
question. The rover had a top speed of seventy klicks per hour, so the
round-trip to Thankgod would take about nineteen or twenty hours. If we
budgeted two hours for our appearance at Thankgod and add two more as a
fudge-factor, and with luck—there's that word again—we'd only lose a
sol. Thus we figured the storm should blow itself out by the time we
made it back to DaVinci; then we'd be able to reinflate the blimp and
head for New Chattanooga. The kids at the remaining colonies on our
tour might have to wait a bit for their Christmas, but there were
limits to even Sinterklass's magic. However, we had little doubt that
we'd make it to Thankgod. That's what we told ourselves. In
hindsight, I think we were counting on miracles we hadn't earned. * * * * So Doc and I loaded our stuff into the
rover and set out from DaVinci near the middle of the same sol. The
wind was already rising from the west as we followed the line of
compacted rover tracks away from the colony into the high country
northeast of the Valles Marineris. We hadn't covered a hundred klicks
before Doc had to switch on the windshield blowers. Well, no problem. You've seen one dust
storm, you've seen a dozen. I brewed some more coffee, then sacked out
in the shotgun seat. When I woke up, my first thought was that I had
overslept and that night had already fallen, until Doc told me that it
was only late afternoon. The road had completely disappeared behind
rippling curtains of red sand; despite the rover's lights, visibility
had diminished to only a few meters ahead of the front bumper. We were driving into the throat of the
worst winter storm in ... well, forget the stats. It was nasty, and
that's all there was to it. Yet we weren't worried. Not really. We had
a clear satellite fix on our location, so there was no real danger of
getting lost out here. Although our ground speed had dropped to fifty
klicks, the rover's six tandem wheels continued to move through the
dense sand that scurried around us. We had air, we had hot coffee, we
had Nashville music on the CD player; the howling wind buffeted the
rover as if it was a boat on high seas, but it was Christmas, and we
were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet. We couldn't be stopped, storm or no
storm. I had just switched off with Doc, and he
was rummaging through the food locker in search of cold rations which
wouldn't taste too much like cardboard, when we received a microbeam
transmission from Arsia Station. I thought it was just a courtesy call:
the folks back home making sure we weren't in trouble. The reception
was bad, and I was fumbling for a headset when Doc came forward and
told me to keep my hands on the yoke, he'd take care of it. I didn't catch most of it; my attention
was focused on avoiding boulders and craters. Doc played the keys until
he got a semi-clear channel, listened for a few minutes, scribbled some
stuff on a pad, murmured a few words, then clicked off and turned to me. “Problem.” “Big or small?” “Dunno. Phobos Station spotted a lander
making atmospheric entry about a half-hour ago. Probably from a Pax
freighter that made orbit earlier today. Arsia Traffic locked onto its
transponder and followed it down until they lost it in the storm.” “Where did it come down?” Then I shook my
head. “Oh, no. I can guess this one...” “Edge of the Acidalia, about a hundred and
fifty klicks southeast of Thankgod.” “Aw, for the love of...” It figured this might happen, if only
because it had happened before; the commander of a Pax refugee ship
tried to drop his lander on one of the new colonies without first
informing Arsia of his intentions. Pax Royal Intelligence, in an
attempt to stop the hemorrhage of its best and brightest from Clarke
County and the Moon, had recently begun spreading ugly rumors that we'd
launch missiles at any immigrant ships arriving in aresian space. This
played into the hands of freighter captains taking aboard drybacks as
unlisted passengers; they'd load them aboard a lander, drop ‘em near a
new settlement, then swing around the planet, make a periapsis burn,
and scoot for home before anyone was the wiser. The commander and his
crew make out like bandits from the megalox they've taken from their
desperate passengers; meanwhile, we're saddled with another dozen or so
immigrants who didn't know they were being taken for a ride, both
literally and figuratively. Only in this case, the freighter captain
had deposited his human cargo in the middle of a dust storm. Perhaps he
wasn't fully aware of the ferocious nature of the Martian climate, but
I couldn't bring myself to give him to benefit of the doubt. More
likely he knew that dead men don't tell tales, let alone disclose ship
registry numbers. I was still fuming about this while Doc
played with the high-gain. “I've got something,” he murmured after a
few moments. “Weak, but it's there.” “Vox or transponder?” “Transponder. You think we're going to get
local vox through this crap?” Good point. Unless the drybacks were
bouncing signals off one of the satellites, they probably couldn't
transmit anything through the storm. Landers that came down intact,
though, were programmed to broadcast a shortwave distress signal as
soon as they touched down, even if it was only a repeating Morse-code
dit-dot-dit that could be received for hundreds of kilometers. “Mayday
cast?” I asked, and Doc nodded without looking up. “Can you get a lock
on it?” Doc dickered with the keypad a little
while longer before he spoke again. “Yeah, got it. I'm feeding the
coordinates to your board.” A topo map appeared on the flat just above
the yoke. The signal source was approximately hundred and fifty
kilometers east-southeast of Thankgod, about forty klicks west of our
beeline from the colony. Doc looked at me, I looked at him, and that
was it. We didn't even discuss the matter; there was no question of
whether or not we'd head for the crash site. We were Sinterklass and
Zwarte Piet, but before that we were meds, and this is what we did,
plain and simple. “Pain in the ass,” I murmured as I began
punching the new coordinates into the nav system. “Yeah. Kind of screws up Christmas, don't
it?” Doc lurched out of his seat and headed aft again. “So what do you
want? Cheese and tomato, ham and cheese, or turkey?” * * * * It was close to midnight when we located
the downed lander. One moment, it wasn't there; the next, it
was in our high-beams, a gargantuan manta ray that had mysteriously
been thrown across space and time. Its starboard landing skid had
buckled during touchdown, so the craft listed sharply to one side, its
right wing half-buried in the sand, the wind had driven dust into its
engine intakes. The cockpit faced away from us, but there was a dim
glimmer of light from within the main hatch porthole. I halted the rover about ten meters away,
and tried one last time to raise someone on the radio. As before, there
was no answer, not surprising since the ship had sustained heavy damage
during landing. I went aft and found that Doc had already suited up.
Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to either of us to strip off all
the Father Christmas stuff, but now we didn't have the time nor
inclination. So we switched on the holiday lights so we could see each
other better in the darkness. Doc raised his hood and picked up his
medical bag, then we cycled through the airlock. We made our way to the lander with our
heads down, our arms raised to shield our faceplates against windblown
silt and gravel. Glancing back, I could make out the rover only by its
lamps. I doubted that anyone within the lander had heard our approach
through the storm. If, indeed, there were any survivors. Typical of Pax spacecraft, the airlock was
only large enough to accommodate one person at a time. I went first;
Doc waited outside while I closed the outer hatch. The light we'd seen
outside came from an emergency lamp in the ceiling, but there was
sufficient power in the back-up electrical system to allow me to run
the cycle-through routine. I went by the book, though, and didn't
unlatch my helmet even after the green light appeared above the inner
hatch. For a moment, there was only darkness when
I pushed open the hatch. Then a half-dozen flashlight beams swung my
way, and muffled voices cascaded from the gloom: “...opening! Look, the hatch...!” “...the hell, where did he come...?” “...it's a man! Daddy, there's a man
in...!” “...everyone, stand back! Get back from
the...!” “It's okay. Everything's all right!” I
raised a hand against the sudden glare. “I'm from Arsia Station! I'm
here to rescue you!” They couldn't hear me, of course; they
were all shouting at once, and my voice didn't carry well through the
closed helmet. Yet there were at least a dozen people in here, shadows
backlit by flashlight beams. Moving awkwardly against the sloped deck,
I stepped the rest of the way out of the airlock, then turned to close
the hatch behind me. Something slammed against my shoulder,
hard enough to make me lose my balance. I collapsed against the airlock
hatch. It fell into place, then a hand grabbed my shoulder and twisted
me around, shoving me back against the portal. “Don't move!” a voice yelled at me. “Keep
your hands where I can see ‘em!” “Hey, cut it out!” I yelled back. “I'm
just trying to...!” There's nothing like having a gun shoved
in your face to kill conversation. Even in the dim light, I could make
out the maw of a Royal Militia blaster, a miniature particle-beam
cannon capable of ending all debate over my hat size. The guy holding it didn't look too
pleasant, either: a large gent with a selenian helmet tan, his dark
eyes narrowed with rage. His breath fogged my faceplate—it must be
pretty cold in here for it to do that—but above the heavy sweater he
wore was a blue uniform jacket. Its epaulets told me it was from the
Pax Astra Royal Navy. I had a hunch that it wasn't military surplus. “Kyle, cut it out!” A woman's voice
somewhere behind the ring of flashlights. “Can't you see he's...?” “Shut up, Marcie.” Kyle let go of me and
backed away a few centimeters, but kept his weapon trained on my face.
“Okay, Mars boy, I.D. yourself.” I took a deep breath. “Look, calm down,
okay? Don't shoot. I'm not here to...” “Jeez, lieutenant, let him take off his
helmet.” This from another man elsewhere in the compartment. “How can
you hear him?” “Kyle...” Marcie said. “Everyone shut up!” Kyle braced his feet
against the deck. “Okay, open up ... slowly.” “Okay, all right. Take it easy.” I slowly
moved my hands to my suit collar, began unlatching the ring. I heard a
child crying from somewhere in the darkness. I was getting a bad feeling about my
friend Kyle. If he was a former PARN officer, then he was doubtless a
deserter. Worse, he had most likely heard the Pax agitprop that
aresians are cannibals who raid dryback landers. My Christmas gear
didn't help matters much; it wasn't your usual standard-issue skinsuit,
so to him I probably looked like the Martian equivalent of a wild
native wearing a grass skirt and a shrunken head. The man was desperate
and afraid, and hiding his fear behind a gun. “Look,” I said once I had removed my
helmet, “you're not in any danger, I promise you. We're a med team from
Arsia Station. Our rover's just outside. We picked up your transponder
signal and...” “There's more than one of you?” His eyes
flickered to the hatch behind me. “How many are out there?” Great. Now he thought he was surrounded.
“Just one other guy. I promise you, we're not armed. Please, just put
down the gun and we can see about getting you out of this jam, okay?” “Kyle, would you listen to him?” The woman
who had spoken before, Marcie, stepped a little closer. Now I saw that
her neck was wrapped in thick swatches of torn fabric. A crude neck
brace; she probably suffered whiplash during the crash. “He doesn't
mean us any harm, and we're...” “Dammit, Marcie, did you hear what he just
said? Nobody drives from Arsia Station in a rover. If there was going
to be rescue mission, why didn't it come from Thankgod?” Kyle's gun
didn't budge an millimeter. “I'm not about to take this guy at his
word. He's just going to have to...” Whatever Kyle was about to propose that I
do—I suspect it wasn't pleasant—it was forgotten when the hatch
suddenly clunked. Everyone heard the sound. They froze,
staring past me. I felt the hatch nudge my back, and I automatically
moved aside before I realized what I was doing. “Doc,” I yelled, “don't come in!” “Shut up!” Kyle shifted his gun first to
cover me, then aimed it at the hatch. “You there, listen up! I've got a
gun on your pal, so you'd better stop right ...!” “Ho, ho, ho! Mer-r-r-ry Christmas!
Mer-r-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” Then the hatch was pushed fully open, and
in walked Sinterklass. Doc had removed his helmet and had lowered
his hood. In the darkness of the cabin, the lights of his suit glowed
like a childhood fantasy. Motes of dust swirled from his red cape and
caught in his long white beard like flakes of fresh-fallen snow. “Mer-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” he bellowed
again, and gave another jolly laugh. In that instant, he was no longer Doc
Spanjaard. He had become every holiday legend. Sinterklass, St.
Nicholas, Father Christmas... “Santa!” The little girl I had heard earlier bolted
from the gloom. Before Kyle or Marcie or anyone else could grab her,
she rushed across the dark cabin. “It's Santa Claus!” she screamed. “Santa's
on Mars! Mama, you were right! There's a Santa Claus on Mars!” As Doc bent to catch her in his arms, I
heard another child call out, then another, and suddenly two more kids
darted past the legs of the bewildered adults surrounding us. They were
all over Doc before anyone could stop them, least of all Kyle, who
suddenly didn't seem to know what to do with the gun in his hands, and
Doc was laughing so hard that I thought he was going to lose his
balance and fall back into the airlock with three children on top of
him, and everyone else was yelling in relieved surprise... Then Marcie turned to Kyle, who stood in
gape-jawed confusion, his blaster now half-raised toward the ceiling so
that it wasn't pointed at any of the kids. “So what are you going to do?” she
murmured. “Be the guy who shot Santa Claus?” He stared at Doc, then at me. “But it
isn't Christmas yet.” “Welcome to Mars,” I said quietly. “We do
things a little different here.” He nodded, then put the gun away. * * * * And that was our Christmas miracle. We dispensed some food from the lander;
the three children were handed toys from Doc's sack and the adults were
given two bottles of wine. Doc spent a couple of hours treating
injuries while I went back to the rover and radioed both Thankgod and
Arsia to tell them that we had located the lander. Arsia informed me
that the storm was ebbing in our region and that DaVinci had already
volunteered to send out a couple of rovers to pick up the new arrivals.
I relayed the news to Kyle, whom I learned was their leader; he
couldn't look me straight in the eye when he tendered an apology for
his behavior, but I accepted it anyway. By the time Doc and I left the crash site,
the first light of dawn was appearing on the eastern horizon; it might
be mid-summer back on Earth, but here it was the third sol of
Christmas. Peace on Mars, good will towards men. We completed that long, hard tour, and
returned to Arsia Station only a little later than usual. Once I had
put Miss Thuvia to bed, Doc and I decompressed in the Mars
Hotel. For the first time since we had started this little homecoming
ritual, we allowed ourselves to get drunk. No wonder Doc rarely got
blotto; he didn't hold his liquor very well. He sang dirty songs and
made jokes no one understood; it's a good thing no children were
present, because he would have ruined Christmas for them forever. The
last I saw of him that night, he was being helped out of the bar by two
of his girlfriends, neither of whom seemed likely to let him quietly
pass out before they gave him the mistletoe treatment. We made eight more Christmas tours before
I retired from service. By then I was married and running AeroMars; my
wife and business partners didn't want me leaving Arsia Station for
several sols each year to haul candy and toys to distant settlements.
Nor was it necessary for me to play Black Peter any longer; now there
were nineteen self-sustaining colonies scattered across the planet, and
nearly every one of them had their own homemade Sinterklass and Zwarte
Piet costumes. Doc, though, continued to play his role
every year, if only to take a rover out to nearby settlements. He was
the first and best Sinterklass on Mars, and everyone wanted to see him;
he relished the job, and continued it long after he set up a private
practice at Arsia. Toys and candy for all the children, wine for the
adults, and a different Zwarte Piet everywhere he went. It was what he
did, period. And whenever he came home, we got together for drinks and
small talk. Twelve years after we made the Acidalia
rescue mission, though, Doc didn't come back to the bar. He went out
alone to Ascension during another dust storm and ... well, vanished. No
final transmissions, and no one ever found his vehicle. He simply
disappeared, just like that. I miss Doc, but I think this is an
appropriate way to go. Mars is full of mystery; so is Christmas, or at
least it should be. The holiday got ruined on Earth because everything
wonderful about it was gradually eroded, the magic sucked away. Out
here, though, we've got a great Christmas, and a patron saint all our
own. He lives in the caldera of Olympus Mons. -----------------------------------
A DF Books NERDs Release Copyright ©1998 by Allen M. Steele First published in Analog, December 1998
People often speak of Christmas as being a
season of miracles. Indeed, it sometimes seems that's all you hear
about during the holiday season; download the daily newsfeed, and
you're sure to find at least one doe-eyed story about a lost child
reunited with his parents, a stray pet finding his way home, a maglev
train that barely avoids colliding with another, a house burning down
without anyone being killed. These things can happen at any time, and
often do, but when they occur at Christmas, a special significance is
attached to them, as if an arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar
somehow has a magical portent. That sort of thing may go smooth on Earth,
but anyone on Mars who believes in miracles is the sort of person you
don't want to be with during a habitat blowout or a dust storm alert.
Belief in miracles implies belief in divine intervention, or luck at
the very least; that kind of attitude has killed more people out here
than anything else. Luck won't help you when a cell of your dome
undergoes explosive decompression, but having paid attention during
basic training will. I've known devoutly religious people who've died
because they panicked when a wall of sand came barrelling across the
plains, while atheists who kept their heads and sprinted to the nearest
shelter have survived. Four people returning to Wellstown from a water
survey were killed on Earth's Christmas Day back in m.y. 46, when the
driver of their rover rolled the vehicle down a twenty-meter
embankment; there was no yuletide miracle for them. I'm sorry if this may seem cynical, but
that's the way it is. Almost a million aresians now live on Mars, and
we didn't face down this cold red world by believing in Santa Claus.
Luck is something you make for yourself; miracles occur when you get
extra-lucky. I've been here for over twenty years now, and I've never
seen it work differently, whether it be on Christmas, Yom Kippur, or
First Landing Day. Yet still ... there's always an exception. * * * * Sure, we celebrate Christmas on Mars. We
just don't do it the same way as on Earth. The first thing you have to remember is
that we count the days a bit differently. Having 39.6 more minutes each
day, and 669 days—or sols, as we call ‘em—in a sidereal period, meant
that aresians threw out both Greenwich Mean Time and the Gregorian
calendar in a.d. 2032, long before the Pax Astra took control of the
near-space colonies, way before Mars declared its independence. The
Zubrin calendar has twelve months, ranging from 48 to 66 sols in
length, each named after a Zodiac constellation; it retroactively began
on January 1, 1961, which became Gemini 1, m.y. 1 by local reckoning.
The conversion factors from Gregorian to Zubrin calendars are fairly
complex, so don't ask for an explanation here, except to say that one
of the first things newcomers from Earth have to realize is that April
Fool pranks are even less funny at Arsia Station than they were back in
Indiana. Indeed, aresians pretty much did away with
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, and virtually
every other Earth holiday. Our New Year's is out of whack with the rest
of the solar system, and instead of Columbus Day we have First Landing;
when Mars seceded from the Pax Astra in 2066, or m.y. 57, we began
commemorating the event with our own Independence Day. A few religious
holidays continue to be observed at the same time as they are on Earth.
West Bank, the small Jewish settlement on the western slope of the
Tharsis bulge, celebrates hanukkah in accordance with the traditional
Hebrew calendar; I was once there for the third night of hanukkah, and
watched as the family with whom I was staying lit its menorah when the
colony's DNAI calculated the sun had set in Jerusalem. Christmas has been imported as well, yet
because the aresian year was nearly twice as long as Earth's, it comes
around half as often. The first colonists tried having their Christmas
promptly on December 25th, but it felt odd to be celebrating Christmas
twice a year, sometimes in the middle of the Martian summer. When the
colonies formally adopted the Zubrin calendar in m.y. 38, it was
decided that the aresian Christmas would fall only once every two Earth
years; this meant that we had to devise our own way of observing the
holiday. So instead of designating one single sol in Taurus as being
Christmas Day, aresians picked the second week of the month as
Christmas Week, beginning on Ta. 6 and continuing through Ta.13; it was
roughly adapted from the Dutch tradition of observing December 6 as the
Feast of St. Nicholas. During that week, everyone would take a break
from all but the most essential labor, and this would give families and
clans a chance to get together and exchange gifts. Devout Christians
who wished to continue unofficially observing December 25 as Jesus's
birthday were welcome to do so—New Chattanooga and Wellstown took two
sols off each aresian year for a terran-style Christmas—but it wasn't
marked on the Zubrin calendar. Most of the original Seven Colonies, with
the exception of West Bank, accepted Christmas Week as a respite from
the hard work of settling the Martian frontier. As more immigrants from
Earth and the Moon began establishing new colonies along the eastern
equator, they adopted Christmas Week as well. Yet, as time went on, the
aresian Christmas began to lose much of its original meaning. Indeed, as some noted, the week never had
that much meaning to begin with. Since it wasn't held to celebrate of
the birth of Christ, it had little religious significance. Families and
clans tended to live in the same colonies, often sharing the same
quarters, so there wasn't much point in setting aside an entire week
for them to get together. These colonists lived on the verge of
poverty; Pax trade tariffs and the enormous cost of importing items
from Earth made Christmas presents beyond the reach of most people, and
giving someone a new helmet liner is hardly the stuff of romance. So
what usually happened during Christmas Week was that people congregated
in taprooms to get ripped on homebrew and hempweed; when the taprooms
closed, louts roamed the corridors looking for trouble. By mid-century,
Christmas Week had degenerated into debauchery, random violence, and
the occasional fatal accident. It wasn't a lot of fun. Worse yet was the fact that the first
generation of aresians to be born on Mars was growing up with only
second-hand knowledge of what Christmas was supposed to be like. They'd
read old microfiche stories about Rudolph and Santa Claus, the Grinch
and Scrooge, or watch disks of ancient films like It's A Wonderful
Life and Frosty the Snowman, and then go to their parents
asking why Santa didn't drop down their chimney to leave wrapped and
ribboned gifts beneath a tree strung with lights and tiny ornaments.
Perhaps you can successfully explain to a four-year-old why there
aren't any reindeer and Douglas firs on Mars, or even point out that
your two-room apartment doesn't have a hearth, let alone a chimney ...
but try telling a small child that there's no such person as Santa. Mars was in desperate need of a St.
Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In m.y. 52, he arrived in
the form of Dr. Johann Spanjaard. * * * * Despite the fact that I'm one of the few
people on Mars who knew him well, there's very little I can tell you
about Doc Spanjaard. That's not much a surprise, though; folks came
here for many different reasons, and not always the best ones.
Frontiers tend to attract people who didn't quite fit in the places
they came from, and on Mars it's impolite to ask someone about their
past if they don't voluntarily offer that information themselves. Some
aresians will blabber all day about their home towns or their old job,
but others I've known for twenty years and still don't know where they
were born, or even their real names. Johann Spanjaard fell somewhere between
these extremes. He was born in Holland, but I don't know when: around
a.d. 2030 is my best guess, since he appeared to be in his early
forties when he arrived at Arsia Station. He was trained as a
paramedic, and briefly worked on Clarke County; and later at Descartes
Station. He was a Moon War vet; he told me that he witnessed the Battle
of Mare Tranquillitatis, but if he had any combat medals he never
showed them to me. He returned to Earth, stayed there a little while,
left again to take a short job as a beltship doctor, then finally
immigrated to Mars. There were at least two women in his past—Anja, his
first wife, and Sarah, his second—but he seldom spoke of them, although
he sent them occasional letters. No children. In hindsight, that may be the
most significant fact of all: even after marrying and leaving two
wives, Doc didn't have any kids. Save that thought. Doc Spanjaard immigrated to Mars in m.y.
52, five aresian years before the colonies broke away from Pax. By then
Arsia Station had become the largest colony; nearly a hundred thousand
people lived in reasonable comfort within the buckydomes and
underground malls that had grown up around the base camp of the
original American expedition, just south of the Noctis Labyrinthis
where, on a nice clear day, you could just make out the massive
volcanic cone of Arsia Mons looming over the western horizon. The
colony had finally expanded its overcrowded infirmary into a
full-fledged hospital, and Doc was one of the people hired to staff its
new emergency ward. I came to know Doc because of my job as an
airship pilot. One of Arsia General's missions was providing medical
airlifts to our six neighbor colonies in the western hemisphere;
although they had infirmaries of their own, none possessed Arsia
General's staff or equipment. The hospital had contracted my employer,
AeroMars, to fly doctors out to these remote settlements and, on
occasion, bring back patients for treatment. Within two sols of Doc's
arrival at Arsia General, I flew him over the Valles Marineris to
Wellstown so he could treat a burn victim from an explosion at the fuel
depot. We ended up hauling the poor guy back to Arsia Station that same
day; the sortie lasted twenty-seven hours, coming and going, and when
it was over we were too wired to go to bed, so we wandered over to the
Mars Hotel and had a few beers. That trip established a regular pattern
for us: fly out, do what had to be done, fly back, hand the case over
to the ER staff, then head to the nearest taproom to decompress.
However, I seldom saw Doc Spanjaard get loaded; three beers was his
limit, and he never touched hard liquor. Which was fine with me; I'm a
featherweight drinker myself, and two beers was the most I'd allow
myself because I never knew when I'd get beeped to drag Miss Thuvia
back into the sky again. But the three of us logged a lot of klicks
together; once I had the princess tied down in her hangar and Doc had
washed someone else's blood off his hands, we'd park our rumps in a
quiet bar and tap mugs for a job well done. We were a mutt-'n-jeff team if there ever
was one. Doc was tall and preposterously skinny, with solemn blue eyes
and fair skin that helmet burn had freckled around his trim white
beard; imagine an underfed St. Nicholas and you've got it down. I was
the short, dumpy black sidekick from Tycho City who had a thing for
Burroughs classics and loved old Eddie Murphy movies even though I had
never spent more than two weeks on Earth (what can I say? he made me
laugh). But Doc had a wry sense of humor that most people didn't see,
and I was the only airlift pilot who wouldn't panic when he had to
perform a emergency tracheotomy at twelve hundred meters with a utility
knife and a pen. We saw a lot of action over the course of
the next nine months; by my count, we saved at least thirty lives and
lost only four. Not bad for two guys whose biggest complaint was losing
a lot of sleep. The Martian Chronicle caught wind of our act
and wanted to do a story on us. We talked it over during a ride back
from Sagan, then radioed back to Arsia General and arranged for the
reporter to meet us at the Mars Hotel after we got home. The reporter
was there, along with his photographer and one of Doc's former
patients, a sweet young thing from West Bank whose heart was still
beating again due to Doc's ministrations and my flying skills, but gee
gosh, we forgot where we were supposed to meet them and went to Lucky
Pierre's instead. Two more missed interviews, followed by profuse
apologies and sworn promises that we'd be at the right place next time,
went by before the Chronicle finally got the message. On Mars,
the phrase “mind your own business” is taken seriously, even by the
press. But it wasn't always funny stuff. Our job
took us places you'd never want to see, the settlements established
along the equatorial zone surrounding the Valles Marineris. Over forty
Earth years had elapsed since First Landing, and humankind had made
substantial footholds on this big red planet, yet beyond the safe, warm
confines of Arsia Station life could be pretty grim. New Chattanooga
was infested with sandbugs, the seemingly indestructible mites which
lived in the permafrost and homed in on any aquifer large enough for
them to lay eggs; the colony's water tanks were literally swimming with
them, and despite the best filtration efforts they were in every cup of
coffee you drank and every sponge-bath you took. DaVinci was populated
by neocommunists who, despising bourgeois culture and
counterrevolutionary influences, wanted little to do with the rest of
the colonies, and therefore turned down most aid offered by Arsia
Station. Their subsurface warrens were cold and dimly-lit, their
denizens hard-eyed and ready to quote Mao Tse Tung as soon as you
entered the airlock. Viking, the northernmost settlement, was located
on the Chryse Planitia near the Viking I landing site: two hundred
people huddled together in buckydomes while eking out the most
precarious of existences, and every time we visited them, the
population had grown a little smaller. And people spoke only in hushed
tones about Ascension, the settlement near Sagan just south of the
Valles Marineris that had been founded by religious zealots; living in
self-enforced isolation, running short of food and water, finally cut
off from the neighboring colonies by the planetwide dust storm of m.y.
47, its inhabitants began murdering one another, then cannibalizing the
corpses. Doc and I saw a side of the Martian
frontier that most people on Earth didn't even know existed:
hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or
malfunctioning equipment, psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what
we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our sorrows in homemade
brew. There's many wonderful things about Mars, but it's not Earth or
even the Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it
doesn't kill outright, it conspires to drive insane. Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy
ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what
we missed about Christmas. * * * * It was the third week of Aries, m.y. 53.
Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the taprooms
were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just
returned from delivering medical supplies to the poor schmucks at
Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some discarded
fiberoptics over the bar. “I miss mistletoe,” I murmured. I was
working on my second beer by then, so I wasn't conscious of my
alliteration. “Mistletoe and Christmas trees.” “You don't know mistletoe and Christmas
trees,” Doc said. “Sure do. Had them in my family's
apartment. My mother and father, they used to kiss beneath the...” “You grew up on the Moon. You had vinyl
mistletoe and plastic Christmas trees. Bet you've never smelled the
real thing.” “No, but it was close enough.” “Not in the slightest. You'd know the
difference.” Doc sipped his beer. “But I get the point. Out in the
belt, we'd get together in the wardroom on Christmas Eve and sing
carols. You know caroling...?” “Sure. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘The First Day of
Christmas,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock'...” “'Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,’ that's
my favorite. And then we'd exchange gifts. Sarah gave me a ring with a
little piece of gold from an asteroid ore our ship had refined.” He
smiled at the memory. “Marriage didn't last, but I held onto the ring.” “My favorite was a little rocket from my
Dad. I was eight ... nine, I guess. He made it for me in his lab. About
two meters long, with a hollow nose cone. We put a little note with our
squid number in the cone, then went EVA and hiked up to the crater rim,
set the trajectory, fueled it up and fired it at Earth.” Once again, I
remembered that little rocket's silent launch, and how it lanced
straight up into the black sky over Tycho. “Dad told me that it would
eventually get there and land somewhere, and maybe someone would find
it and send back a letter.” “Anyone ever fax you?” “Naw. It probably never got to Earth ...
or if it did, it probably burned up on entry.” I shrugged. “But I like
to think that it made the trip, and just landed some place where no one
ever found it.” “But it meant something, didn't it? Like
Sarah's ring. No Christmas gift is ever insignificant. There's always a
little of your soul in whatever you give someone.” Doc scowled at the
lights being strung above the bar. “Here, it's just an excuse for
people to get drunk and stupid, and the next day everyone has to
apologize to each other. Sorry for banging on your door. Sorry for
keeping you awake last night. Sorry for making a pass at your wife...” “What do you expect? Rudolph the
green-nosed reindeer?” “Red. Rudolph the red-nosed
reindeer. Don't they teach you selenians anything?” “Oh, yeah. Red-nosed reindeer.” I polished
off my second and last, shoved the mug across the bar. “Yeah, I know,
but all that Santa stuff doesn't make a lot of sense out here, y'know?” “It doesn't? Why shouldn't it?” I could tell that he was spoiling for a
fight. “Aw, c'mon, Doc ... does this look like Earth to you? Cheststuff
smoking on an open fire, jackass stepping on your toes...” “You can't even get the lyrics right!
‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your
toes...'” “What's a chestnut?” “Never mind.” He turned away from me.
“Jeff, I'll have another one. Put it on his tab.” I didn't object. Doc was in a
self-righteous mood; when he was this way, silence was the only way you
could deal with him. I helped myself to some fried algae from the bowl
the bartender had placed between us while I waited for him to calm down. “I guess what I miss the most,” he finally
said, “is the look ... no, not just the look, the glow ...
children have on Christmas morning. Until I came here, I'd never seen a
kid who didn't think it was the best day of the year. Even out in the
belt, it was something they could look forward to. But here...” “I know what you mean.” My gaze wandered
to the line of ceramic liquor bottles lined up on the shelf. “The best
some of them can hope for is that their folks won't be too hung over to
make breakfast for them. I mean, some people try to do better, but ...
I dunno, something's missing.” “I'll tell you what's missing” Doc tapped
his finger against the bartop. “It isn't just trees or presents. Magic,
that's missing. There's no Sinterklass.” “Yeah. No Santa Claus.” “Did I say Santa Claus? I didn't say Santa
Claus. I said Sinterklass.” “There's a difference?” For a moment, I thought he was going to
brain me with his beer mug. “Hell, yes, there's a difference!
Sinterklass arrives in Holland on a ship from Spain. He's a tall,
slender gent with a long white beard who wears a red robe and bishop's
minter. He rides into town on a white horse with his assistant Zwarte
Piet, where he gives presents to all the good children on his list.
Then he ... what's so damn funny?” “That's Santa Claus, you quack! Only the
details are different! Reindeer, elves, a sleigh from the North Pole
... it's still the same mook, right down to the extortion racket.” “True, but Sinterklass came first ... or
St. Nicholas, if we want to call him by his proper name.” He swigged
his beer. “He was brought to America by the Dutch, but just like
everything else brought over from Europe, he was changed until
virtually no one remembered his origins.” “Tell me about it. Same thing happened to
my African ancestors ... although not by choice.” “Then you'd appreciate the similarity
between Santa's elves and Zwarte Piet. It means Black Peter ... he's a
Moor.” I shrugged. “Sounds like a demotion. My
great-grandfather used to play Santa every Christmas at a shopping
mall. There weren't many of them black Santas back then, I'm told.” “Your grandfather played Santa Claus?” He
raised an eyebrow. “Now there's a coincidence. My father played
Sinterklass in our village, as did my grandfather.” “No kidding?” “Goes with the genes.” He stroked his trim
white beard. “Men in my family have the right whiskers for the job. All
we have to do is let our beard grow out and...” He stopped just then. To this day, I'll
never forget his slack-jawed expression as he stared at me in
wonderment. He had just spoken of the glow that children have on
Christmas morning; in that instant, I saw something like that appear in
his own face. Wonder and joy, wonder and joy; tidings of wonder and joy
... I don't believe in telepathy any more than I do in Santa Claus, yet
I suddenly knew exactly what he was thinking. “Oh, no, you don't,” I said, turning to
hop off the stool and book out of there. “Don't even think for a
minute...” “Oh, shut up and sit down.” Doc grabbed my
wrist before I could make it to the door. “Let's see if we can work
this out.” Against my better judgement, I stayed. Doc
finished his beer, and then we switched to coffee, and by the end of
the evening I had a new name. * * * * Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet live in the
caldera of Olympus Mons, within an invisible buckydome which contains
their secret toyshop. When they're not making toys or teaching sandbugs
to perform tricks for their flea circus, they watch all the boys and
girls of Mars through magic telescopes that can peer through walls,
putting together a long list of who's been naughty and who's been nice. Then, on the first sol of Christmas Week,
they load their gifts aboard their airship, climb aboard, and fly away
from Olympus Mons. Over the next seven sols they visit the colonies one
by one, stopping at each to distribute presents to the good children of
Mars. They may stay overnight at a settlement, because sometimes Black
Peter gets too tired to fly St. Nicholas to the next colony, but if
they do stay, the children should try to leave the pair alone, or next
Christmas they may find the boots of their skinsuits filled with sand
instead of candy. That's the story that we artfully
disseminated through the Marsnet. It was posted on all the usual sites
kids would mouse, plus a few that their parents would find. It isn't
hard to create a myth, if know what you're doing, but Doc and I didn't
do it all by ourselves, and not without running into a little trouble. Arsia Station's board of selectmen were
skeptical when we formally pitched the idea to them at the next weekly
meeting. They thought Doc and I had dreamed this up as a sneaky way of
earning overtime until Doc explained that we would also be transporting
food, medical supplies, and replacement parts to the settlements. Not
only that, but since we would be hitting each settlement in turn, we
could take stuff from one place to another, in much the same way supply
caravans presently operated, yet in a shorter time-span and for more
charitable reasons. The selectmen were all too aware of the ill-will
some of the smaller settlements felt toward Arsia; our plan would make
for good colonial relationships. So they found a few extra megalox in
the budget to fund an extended medical sortie, not the least of which
was subcontracting Miss Thuvia from AeroMars for a seven-sol
sortie. When we contacted the other five colonies
and informed them of our proposal, we received mixed reactions.
Wellstown, Sagan, Viking, and New Chattanooga were mystified by the
notion of a Martian Santa, but otherwise interested, albeit not wildly
enthusiastic; if anything, it meant they would be receiving a
previously unscheduled visit from Arsia General, and a few freebies to
boot. West Bank was initially cool to the idea—they didn't observe
Christmas Week, after all—until we agreed to knock off the Sinterklass
routine and perform as if it was just another airlift. But DaVinci was
the aresian home of Ebenezer Scrooge; after a few days of stone
silence, we received a terse fax from its Proletariat, stating that the
free people of DaVinci had decided to reject St. Nicholas was an
archaic symbol of capitalistic society and Black Peter as a shameful
hold-over of racist imperialism. Well, tough boots: no candy for the
commies. Most people went for it, though, and once
word leaked out about what Doc and I intended to do, we received
assistance from various individuals, sometimes without us soliciting
them for help. Aresians have a strong tradition of looking out for the
other guy, after all, and the citizens of Arsia Station came out for
us. A textile shop volunteered to make toys for us: tiny Mars landers,
statuettes of men in skinsuits, some inflatable replicas of Miss
Thuvia. A food-processing firm turned out several kilos of hard
candy; it looked weird and tasted the same, or at least so I thought,
but Doc field-tested samples on kids passing through the ER ward and
none of them spit it out. A lady I was dating from Data One hacked out
a game pak which she stored on a handful of spare disks; one of them
was a little hide-and-seek involving Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet
chasing each other through a three-dimensional maze. She made sure that
the odds of Black Peter winning the match were always in my character's
favor, something which Doc resented when he tried playing it. Yet the best efforts were those on behalf
of our skinsuits. It wouldn't do for us to cycle through airlocks
looking like any other dust-caked aresian coming in from the cold.
Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet were magical, after all; we had to look the
part. So we hired Uncle Sal, Arsia's premier skinsuit tailor, to come
up with some hempcloth overgarments which closely mimicked the
traditional costumes worn in the Netherlands. Doc's outfit was bright
red and white, with a long scarlet cape whose ribbed hood, when pulled
over his helmet, looked much like a bishop's minter. My costume was
dark blue, with a plumed white collar around the neck and puffed-out
sleeves and leggings. To add to the effect, Sal weaved colored
microfilaments through the garments; when we switched them on, we
looked like walking Christmas trees. The only problem we had was with Doc's
beard. He stopped trimming it once our plan was approved, and within a
couple of weeks it flowed down his face like a pale waterfall. It
looked terrific and his girlfriends loved running their fingers through
it, but he had the damnedest time tucking it into his helmet. He
finally figured out what that hearty “ho-ho-ho” business was all about;
it allowed him to spit out the whiskers in his mouth. Altogether, it was an impressive effort,
doubly so by the fact that we pulled it all together in less than three
weeks. On Ta. 6, m.y. 53, Doc and I climbed aboard Miss Thuvia
and set sail from Arsia Station. The blimp had been temporarily
festooned with multicolored lights. I turned them on as soon as we were
clear of the hangar, and watched from the gondola windows as a small
crowd of aresians waved us farewell. It was a good beginning, but our first
stop, at twilight on the first day of the tour, was a bust. West Bank
didn't want anything to do with Christmas, so I kept the lights turned
off when we approached the settlement on the western slope of the
Tharsis volcano range, and we weren't wearing our outfits when we
exited the blimp's airlock. The settlers were cordial enough; we handed
out sweets and toys to the handful of kids we met inside, and once
their folks unloaded the supplies they had requested—which wasn't much,
because West Bank took pride in its self-sufficiency—we had a meal and
a glass of wine in the commissary before we were shown the way to the
hostel. Nothing lost, but nothing really gained either, save for fuel
and a night's rest; by dawn the next morning we were airborne again.
The only thing which made the trip worthwhile was seeing the sunrise
over Pavonis Mons as we flew eastward toward the upper edge of the
Noctis Labyrinthis. That was the longest leg of the journey.
Over a thousand klicks lay between West Bank and Wellstown, and
although Doc stood watch in the cockpit while I bunked out for a couple
of hours, I did little more than doze. Questions ran through my mind
even while my eyes were shut, murmuring like the incessant drone of Miss
Thuvia's props. What were we doing, two grown men dressing up like
the Dutch Santa and his Moorish apprentice? I could be home now, trying
to find an unattached lady with whom I could share some holiday cheer.
What were we trying to achieve here? The children at West Bank had
shown only slight interest in us; a little girl had stoically gazed at
the toy lander Doc placed in her hand, and a small boy had made a sour
face when he ate the candy I had given him. Yeah, so maybe Christmas
wasn't part of their culture, but the Jewish friends with whom I had
been raised on the Moon knew what it was, if only for the spirit of the
season. Perhaps Christmas didn't belong on Mars. So why did any of this
matter? When I finally got up and went forward, I
could see that Doc had been contemplating the same thought. “It'll go
better in Wellstown,” he said softly, but I don't think he believed it
either. We ate cold rations as the sun went down
behind us, drank some more powdered coffee, and said very little to one
another until the lights of Wellstown appeared before us, a tiny
cluster of white and amber lights against the cold darkness of the
Martian night. Almost reluctantly, we pulled on our skinsuits; I almost
forgot to switch Miss Thuvia's Christmas lights until we were
above the landing field. A handful of men grabbed our mooring
lines, dragged us in, tied us down. It was only the second time we had
worn our costumes on EVA; Doc stepped on his cape and nearly fell down
the gangway, and the puffed-out legging of my suit forced me into a
bow-legged gait. We looked stupid as we made our way to the airlock of
the nearest buckydome. The final touch came when Doc couldn't fit
inside, and he had to lower the peaked hood of his cape. The outer hatch shut behind us; we got a
chance to study each other as the airlock cycled. Two fools in gaudy,
luminescent skinsuits. A bad dream come to life. We had been flying for
the past twelve hours, but I would have gladly flown straight home if I
thought it would save me any further humiliation. Why did I ever let
Doc talk me into...? Then the green light flashed above the
inner hatch. Doc and I were unclasping our helmets when the lockwheel
began turning its own, then the inner hatch was thrown open from
outside. Bright light rushed into the airlock, and along with it, the
excited squeals of the dozens of children waiting outside. At that instant, it all made perfect sense. * * * * Even after all these years, I still
consider that first Christmas tour to be our best. We ran short of
candy and toys before we were through, and we were bone-tired by the
time we left Sagan for the last leg of the circuit back to Arsia
Station, yet we brought home with us the most exciting discovery since
microfossils were found in the Noctis Labyrinthis. St. Nicholas was alive and well and living
on Mars. How could nearly three hundred kids possibly be wrong? Sometimes it was tough. The children at
Viking broke our hearts: grimy, hungry, wearing cast-off clothes, but
enchanted the moment we stepped through the airlock. None rejected our
awful candy, and they fought jealously over the crude toys from Doc's
bag until we made sure that everyone had something to take home. They
took turns sitting in Sinterklass's lap, and he listened to stories of
hardship and loss that would have horrified the worst curmudgeon.
Several kids were sallow and feverish with lingering illnesses that
required Doc to play physician as well as holiday saint; we were
prepared for that, so after a sneaky sort of examination ("How long is
your tongue? I bet you've got the longest one here. Open your mouth and
let Sinterklass see. Oh, yes, you do, don't you...?") he'd send the
sick ones over to Black Peter for a card trick and a couple of pills;
later, we'd give the rest of the prescription to their parents. Sometimes it was funny. A little girl in
New Chattanooga was adamant in her outspoken belief that Sinterklass
was a fake; the brat kept yanking at Doc's beard, tearing out white
hair by its roots in her dogged attempt to dislodge his mask. She got
candy and a toy—no child came away empty-handed during that first
tour—but before we left the following morning I tracked down her
skinsuit in the community ready-room and filled her boots with handfuls
of sand. She was much nicer to us the next year. Sagan's resident
nymphomaniac decided that the holiday season wasn't complete until, in
her words, she had “made Santa's bells jingle.” She started by sitting
in his lap and whispering something in Doc's ear that succeeded in
turning his nose bright red. At any other time, Doc might have obliged,
once they were safely away from the little ones, but he decided that
this might set a bad precedent. To her credit, she took his refusal
with good grace ... and then she asked me why I was called Black Peter. And, yeah, sometimes it was scary. A slow
leak in one of her hydrogen cells caused Miss Thuvia to lose
altitude as we were flying from Viking to New Chattanooga. The pressure
drop occurred while we were flying over Cupri Chasm, one of the deepest
parts of the Valles Marineris; for a few minutes, it looked as if we
would crash in the red-rock canyon dozens of kilometers below us. I
awoke Doc from his nap and he scrambled into the gondola's rear to open
the ballast valves. When that wasn't enough, he shoved some cargo
containers out the airlock—including, much to our regret, one
containing several bottles of homemade wine we were freighting from
Wellstown to the other colonies. We jettisoned enough weight from the
princess to keep her aloft just long enough to clear the chasm, but she
left skid marks when she landed at New Chattanooga. And then we had to
put on our costumes and pretend that we hadn't just cheated death by
only a few kilos. But it was fun, and it was exhilarating,
and it was heart-warming, and it was good. Even before we
arrived back at Arsia Station, where we were greeted not by the small
handful who had witnessed our departure a week earlier but by hundreds
of skinsuited colonists who surrounded the crater and threw up their
arms as Miss Thuvia came into sight, Doc and I swore to one
another that we'd make the same trip again next year. It wasn't because our newfound fame—we
still ducked the Martian Chronicle when it came to us for an
interview—or the lure of adventure, or even another shot at our cuddly
friend in Sagan. It was simply because we'd brought something pure,
decent and civilized to Mars. Perhaps that was a Christmas miracle in
itself. If so, then we wanted another one, and another one after that. We'd eventually receive our miracle. But
it wasn't one I would have ever expected. * * * * In 2066, the Pax Astra underwent a
political upheaval when the Monarchists overthrew the ruling New Ark
Party on the Clarke County space colony near Earth. The coup d'etat was
led by former New Ark members frustrated with the economic stagnation
brought on by the Pax's government by consensus. They formed an
opposition party with the intent of recasting the Pax Astra as a
democratic monarchy, and eventually deposed the New Ark in a
near-bloodless revolution. Yet shortly after Queen Macedonia had been
crowned, the aresian representatives to the new Parliament realized
that Martian interests were a very low priority in the new order. The
diplomats caught the next cycleship home; no sooner had they arrived at
Arsia Station that they formally announced that Mars was seceding from
the Pax Astra and that its colonies were declaring political
independence. This was the beginning of the great
Martian immigration. Within a year, our world began receiving the first
shiploads of refugees from the Pax. Most were New Ark loyalists who had
quickly discovered that Monarchist democracy was restricted to those
who supported the royal agenda, which mainly involved keeping itself in
power and persecuting anyone who objected. Since the Moon was part of
the Pax and life on Earth was intolerable to those who had been born in
low-gee environments, Mars became their only sanctuary. But we hadn't built a Statue of Liberty
anywhere on our planet, and even Arsia Station was ill-equipped to
handle the dozens, then hundreds, of refugees—drybacks, you want to use
the impolite term—who came to us during the long winter of m.y. 57.
Human survival on Mars has always been a frail and precarious matter;
even with mandatory water rationing and voluntary birth control, the
six colonies were unable to support everyone from the Pax who wanted to
move here. Ascension was reopened and West Bank relaxed its standards
to admit non-Jewish immigrants; when their resources were exhausted,
the colonies sent messages to the Pax pleading for it to stop sending
more bodies our way. Yet the Monarchists turned a deaf ear to us; since
Mars was no longer within the Queen's domain, it was a convenient
dumping ground for its dissidents, low-lifes, and criminals. When its
escapees began to include people they wanted to keep to themselves,
they revoked exit visas and began searching outbound vessels. But they
couldn't stop everyone from leaving, and it was a rare week when the
contrail of another lander wasn't spotted streaking across our pink
skies. Some of the newcomers came equipped to
establish new settlements; this was how we got Nova America in the
Solis Planum south of Arsia Station, Graceland in the Margaritifer
northeast of New Chattanooga, and Thankgod up on southern edge of the
Acidalia Plantia. Others arrived with little more than a second-rate
skinsuit and a handful of useless Pax lox that the Mars colonies had
stopped accepting as hard currency. They often came down in cramped
landers stripped of all but the most essential hardware. Many arrived
safely; one way or another, they managed to survive, even prosper. A
few crashed in remote areas. Decades later, explorers were still
finding their remains: sad and lonesome skeletons, desiccated by dust
storms, half-buried within cold red drifts. As the month of Taurus rolled around once
more, Doc and I found little free time to prepare for Christmas Week. I
had received paramedic training by then, so I could assist Doc when we
flew out on a sortie; good thing, too, because Arsia General's
resources were stretched to the limit. Besides the fact that many
immigrants had sustained injuries during landing, just as many had
become ill during their long flight from near-space. Radiation
sickness, calcium deficiency, dysentery, bronchitis, malnutrition,
Tibbet's disease, a half-dozen different strains of influenza ... you
name it, they had it. We had already logged sixteen hundred hours
aboard Miss Thuvia by Christmas, and were seldom seen in the
bars at Arsia Station. Yet just because the colonies were in
crisis didn't mean that Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet got a break.
Indeed, their presence was needed more than ever before; the children
whom we had visited during our first tour were now teenagers and young
adults, but their ranks had been filled by yet more kids, many of whom
were toddlers born on Clarke County and the Moon. Uprooted from their
homes by the Monarchist revolution, bewildered and frightened by their
harsh new environment, some sick, most living in awful poverty, they
needed Christmas just as much as they needed air, food, and medicine. Our annual Christmas tour had become a
major part of aresian life by now. The West Bank elders finally decided
that a little gentile culture wasn't such a bad thing after all, so
they allowed us to wear our costumes when we came to call, and since
DaVinci's socialist government had crumbled a couple of years earlier,
St. Nicholas and Black Peter were now welcome as the next stop after
Viking. Along with the revived Ascension colony and three new
settlements, the tour now had nine stops, not including our home port
at Arsia Station. This meant that Doc and I spent the entire
holiday week on the road, sometimes making two stops a day.
Fortunately, the older colonies had learned to not depend upon Arsia
Station to make the holiday season for them; as well as offering room
and board if we stayed overnight and refuel Miss Thuvia when
she touched down, they began making gifts of their own for their
neighbor settlements. Since Miss Thuvia has a limited payload
capacity, and therefore couldn't haul thousands of kilos of Christmas
presents from one settlement to another, a rather clever system of
gift-giving had been devised: each colony gave presents to the next
settlement on our route. Arsia Station gave to West Bank, West Bank to
Wellstown, Wellstown to Viking, Viking to DaVinci, and so forth. Every
other year, Doc and I reversed the schedule so that DaVinci gave stuff
to Viking, etc. And the gifts themselves ranged from the simple to the
elaborate; West Bank made wonderful handcrafted dreidels that spun
forever, Wellstown could be depended on to supply excellent wine,
DaVinci distributed illustrated chapbooks of poetry and short stories,
Viking's artists contributed tiny yet endlessly fascinating sand
paintings, and Sagan's gliders could fly for almost a quarter-klick.
And, of course, Arsia Station continued to send candy and small toys to
every child who wanted one. The new settlements were still too
impoverished to spend the time or energy to making gifts of their own,
though, so I sent email to representatives at each of the older
colonies, telling them that Black Peter would be reserving a little
extra cargo space aboard Sinterklass's magic dirigible for gifts to
Ascension, Nova America, Graceland, and Thankgod. No one objected to
the deviation from standard operating procedure, and we were promised
extra goodies from everyone when Miss Thuvia lifted off from
Arsia on Sag. 6. For the past four years, the Christmas
tour had been blessed with good flying weather. Our luck couldn't last
forever, though; by the time we arrived at DaVinci, Marsnet had posted
nowcasts of a severe dust storm developing in the Amazonis Plantia, due
west of the Tharsis Montes range. West Bank, which we had left only
eighteen hours earlier, was already reporting high winds. They warned
us that Miss Thuvia wouldn't be able to handle the storm, and
suggested that we deflate our craft and hunker down at DaVinci until
the worst was over. That might be good advice at any other
time, but during Christmas Week it posed a real problem. Dust storms
have been known to last for days or weeks, even months on certain
historic occasions. If Doc and I chose to ride out the storm in
DaVinci, we might be celebrating New Year's there. About two dozen
immigrants in Thankgod were barely holding out in shelters little more
sophisticated than those built by the First Landers; they were in dire
need of the food, water, and medicine aboard Miss Thuvia. And
we quietly regarded DaVinci was our least favorite of stopovers; we
hadn't forgotten the snubbing we'd received during our first tour, and
more than a few hard-line neocommies still hadn't warmed up to us. We managed to get the station manager to
loan us a long-range rover. It was about six hundred and fifty klicks
from DaVinci to Thankgod, but since the rover burned methane/oxygen and
carbon dioxide, it was capable of manufacturing its own fuel from the
atmosphere and from recaptured water vapor from the condensers, and
ditto for cabin air. Using the rover would be slower than taking the
blimp, but flying Miss Thuvia in this sort of weather was out of the
question. The rover had a top speed of seventy klicks per hour, so the
round-trip to Thankgod would take about nineteen or twenty hours. If we
budgeted two hours for our appearance at Thankgod and add two more as a
fudge-factor, and with luck—there's that word again—we'd only lose a
sol. Thus we figured the storm should blow itself out by the time we
made it back to DaVinci; then we'd be able to reinflate the blimp and
head for New Chattanooga. The kids at the remaining colonies on our
tour might have to wait a bit for their Christmas, but there were
limits to even Sinterklass's magic. However, we had little doubt that
we'd make it to Thankgod. That's what we told ourselves. In
hindsight, I think we were counting on miracles we hadn't earned. * * * * So Doc and I loaded our stuff into the
rover and set out from DaVinci near the middle of the same sol. The
wind was already rising from the west as we followed the line of
compacted rover tracks away from the colony into the high country
northeast of the Valles Marineris. We hadn't covered a hundred klicks
before Doc had to switch on the windshield blowers. Well, no problem. You've seen one dust
storm, you've seen a dozen. I brewed some more coffee, then sacked out
in the shotgun seat. When I woke up, my first thought was that I had
overslept and that night had already fallen, until Doc told me that it
was only late afternoon. The road had completely disappeared behind
rippling curtains of red sand; despite the rover's lights, visibility
had diminished to only a few meters ahead of the front bumper. We were driving into the throat of the
worst winter storm in ... well, forget the stats. It was nasty, and
that's all there was to it. Yet we weren't worried. Not really. We had
a clear satellite fix on our location, so there was no real danger of
getting lost out here. Although our ground speed had dropped to fifty
klicks, the rover's six tandem wheels continued to move through the
dense sand that scurried around us. We had air, we had hot coffee, we
had Nashville music on the CD player; the howling wind buffeted the
rover as if it was a boat on high seas, but it was Christmas, and we
were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet. We couldn't be stopped, storm or no
storm. I had just switched off with Doc, and he
was rummaging through the food locker in search of cold rations which
wouldn't taste too much like cardboard, when we received a microbeam
transmission from Arsia Station. I thought it was just a courtesy call:
the folks back home making sure we weren't in trouble. The reception
was bad, and I was fumbling for a headset when Doc came forward and
told me to keep my hands on the yoke, he'd take care of it. I didn't catch most of it; my attention
was focused on avoiding boulders and craters. Doc played the keys until
he got a semi-clear channel, listened for a few minutes, scribbled some
stuff on a pad, murmured a few words, then clicked off and turned to me. “Problem.” “Big or small?” “Dunno. Phobos Station spotted a lander
making atmospheric entry about a half-hour ago. Probably from a Pax
freighter that made orbit earlier today. Arsia Traffic locked onto its
transponder and followed it down until they lost it in the storm.” “Where did it come down?” Then I shook my
head. “Oh, no. I can guess this one...” “Edge of the Acidalia, about a hundred and
fifty klicks southeast of Thankgod.” “Aw, for the love of...” It figured this might happen, if only
because it had happened before; the commander of a Pax refugee ship
tried to drop his lander on one of the new colonies without first
informing Arsia of his intentions. Pax Royal Intelligence, in an
attempt to stop the hemorrhage of its best and brightest from Clarke
County and the Moon, had recently begun spreading ugly rumors that we'd
launch missiles at any immigrant ships arriving in aresian space. This
played into the hands of freighter captains taking aboard drybacks as
unlisted passengers; they'd load them aboard a lander, drop ‘em near a
new settlement, then swing around the planet, make a periapsis burn,
and scoot for home before anyone was the wiser. The commander and his
crew make out like bandits from the megalox they've taken from their
desperate passengers; meanwhile, we're saddled with another dozen or so
immigrants who didn't know they were being taken for a ride, both
literally and figuratively. Only in this case, the freighter captain
had deposited his human cargo in the middle of a dust storm. Perhaps he
wasn't fully aware of the ferocious nature of the Martian climate, but
I couldn't bring myself to give him to benefit of the doubt. More
likely he knew that dead men don't tell tales, let alone disclose ship
registry numbers. I was still fuming about this while Doc
played with the high-gain. “I've got something,” he murmured after a
few moments. “Weak, but it's there.” “Vox or transponder?” “Transponder. You think we're going to get
local vox through this crap?” Good point. Unless the drybacks were
bouncing signals off one of the satellites, they probably couldn't
transmit anything through the storm. Landers that came down intact,
though, were programmed to broadcast a shortwave distress signal as
soon as they touched down, even if it was only a repeating Morse-code
dit-dot-dit that could be received for hundreds of kilometers. “Mayday
cast?” I asked, and Doc nodded without looking up. “Can you get a lock
on it?” Doc dickered with the keypad a little
while longer before he spoke again. “Yeah, got it. I'm feeding the
coordinates to your board.” A topo map appeared on the flat just above
the yoke. The signal source was approximately hundred and fifty
kilometers east-southeast of Thankgod, about forty klicks west of our
beeline from the colony. Doc looked at me, I looked at him, and that
was it. We didn't even discuss the matter; there was no question of
whether or not we'd head for the crash site. We were Sinterklass and
Zwarte Piet, but before that we were meds, and this is what we did,
plain and simple. “Pain in the ass,” I murmured as I began
punching the new coordinates into the nav system. “Yeah. Kind of screws up Christmas, don't
it?” Doc lurched out of his seat and headed aft again. “So what do you
want? Cheese and tomato, ham and cheese, or turkey?” * * * * It was close to midnight when we located
the downed lander. One moment, it wasn't there; the next, it
was in our high-beams, a gargantuan manta ray that had mysteriously
been thrown across space and time. Its starboard landing skid had
buckled during touchdown, so the craft listed sharply to one side, its
right wing half-buried in the sand, the wind had driven dust into its
engine intakes. The cockpit faced away from us, but there was a dim
glimmer of light from within the main hatch porthole. I halted the rover about ten meters away,
and tried one last time to raise someone on the radio. As before, there
was no answer, not surprising since the ship had sustained heavy damage
during landing. I went aft and found that Doc had already suited up.
Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to either of us to strip off all
the Father Christmas stuff, but now we didn't have the time nor
inclination. So we switched on the holiday lights so we could see each
other better in the darkness. Doc raised his hood and picked up his
medical bag, then we cycled through the airlock. We made our way to the lander with our
heads down, our arms raised to shield our faceplates against windblown
silt and gravel. Glancing back, I could make out the rover only by its
lamps. I doubted that anyone within the lander had heard our approach
through the storm. If, indeed, there were any survivors. Typical of Pax spacecraft, the airlock was
only large enough to accommodate one person at a time. I went first;
Doc waited outside while I closed the outer hatch. The light we'd seen
outside came from an emergency lamp in the ceiling, but there was
sufficient power in the back-up electrical system to allow me to run
the cycle-through routine. I went by the book, though, and didn't
unlatch my helmet even after the green light appeared above the inner
hatch. For a moment, there was only darkness when
I pushed open the hatch. Then a half-dozen flashlight beams swung my
way, and muffled voices cascaded from the gloom: “...opening! Look, the hatch...!” “...the hell, where did he come...?” “...it's a man! Daddy, there's a man
in...!” “...everyone, stand back! Get back from
the...!” “It's okay. Everything's all right!” I
raised a hand against the sudden glare. “I'm from Arsia Station! I'm
here to rescue you!” They couldn't hear me, of course; they
were all shouting at once, and my voice didn't carry well through the
closed helmet. Yet there were at least a dozen people in here, shadows
backlit by flashlight beams. Moving awkwardly against the sloped deck,
I stepped the rest of the way out of the airlock, then turned to close
the hatch behind me. Something slammed against my shoulder,
hard enough to make me lose my balance. I collapsed against the airlock
hatch. It fell into place, then a hand grabbed my shoulder and twisted
me around, shoving me back against the portal. “Don't move!” a voice yelled at me. “Keep
your hands where I can see ‘em!” “Hey, cut it out!” I yelled back. “I'm
just trying to...!” There's nothing like having a gun shoved
in your face to kill conversation. Even in the dim light, I could make
out the maw of a Royal Militia blaster, a miniature particle-beam
cannon capable of ending all debate over my hat size. The guy holding it didn't look too
pleasant, either: a large gent with a selenian helmet tan, his dark
eyes narrowed with rage. His breath fogged my faceplate—it must be
pretty cold in here for it to do that—but above the heavy sweater he
wore was a blue uniform jacket. Its epaulets told me it was from the
Pax Astra Royal Navy. I had a hunch that it wasn't military surplus. “Kyle, cut it out!” A woman's voice
somewhere behind the ring of flashlights. “Can't you see he's...?” “Shut up, Marcie.” Kyle let go of me and
backed away a few centimeters, but kept his weapon trained on my face.
“Okay, Mars boy, I.D. yourself.” I took a deep breath. “Look, calm down,
okay? Don't shoot. I'm not here to...” “Jeez, lieutenant, let him take off his
helmet.” This from another man elsewhere in the compartment. “How can
you hear him?” “Kyle...” Marcie said. “Everyone shut up!” Kyle braced his feet
against the deck. “Okay, open up ... slowly.” “Okay, all right. Take it easy.” I slowly
moved my hands to my suit collar, began unlatching the ring. I heard a
child crying from somewhere in the darkness. I was getting a bad feeling about my
friend Kyle. If he was a former PARN officer, then he was doubtless a
deserter. Worse, he had most likely heard the Pax agitprop that
aresians are cannibals who raid dryback landers. My Christmas gear
didn't help matters much; it wasn't your usual standard-issue skinsuit,
so to him I probably looked like the Martian equivalent of a wild
native wearing a grass skirt and a shrunken head. The man was desperate
and afraid, and hiding his fear behind a gun. “Look,” I said once I had removed my
helmet, “you're not in any danger, I promise you. We're a med team from
Arsia Station. Our rover's just outside. We picked up your transponder
signal and...” “There's more than one of you?” His eyes
flickered to the hatch behind me. “How many are out there?” Great. Now he thought he was surrounded.
“Just one other guy. I promise you, we're not armed. Please, just put
down the gun and we can see about getting you out of this jam, okay?” “Kyle, would you listen to him?” The woman
who had spoken before, Marcie, stepped a little closer. Now I saw that
her neck was wrapped in thick swatches of torn fabric. A crude neck
brace; she probably suffered whiplash during the crash. “He doesn't
mean us any harm, and we're...” “Dammit, Marcie, did you hear what he just
said? Nobody drives from Arsia Station in a rover. If there was going
to be rescue mission, why didn't it come from Thankgod?” Kyle's gun
didn't budge an millimeter. “I'm not about to take this guy at his
word. He's just going to have to...” Whatever Kyle was about to propose that I
do—I suspect it wasn't pleasant—it was forgotten when the hatch
suddenly clunked. Everyone heard the sound. They froze,
staring past me. I felt the hatch nudge my back, and I automatically
moved aside before I realized what I was doing. “Doc,” I yelled, “don't come in!” “Shut up!” Kyle shifted his gun first to
cover me, then aimed it at the hatch. “You there, listen up! I've got a
gun on your pal, so you'd better stop right ...!” “Ho, ho, ho! Mer-r-r-ry Christmas!
Mer-r-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” Then the hatch was pushed fully open, and
in walked Sinterklass. Doc had removed his helmet and had lowered
his hood. In the darkness of the cabin, the lights of his suit glowed
like a childhood fantasy. Motes of dust swirled from his red cape and
caught in his long white beard like flakes of fresh-fallen snow. “Mer-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” he bellowed
again, and gave another jolly laugh. In that instant, he was no longer Doc
Spanjaard. He had become every holiday legend. Sinterklass, St.
Nicholas, Father Christmas... “Santa!” The little girl I had heard earlier bolted
from the gloom. Before Kyle or Marcie or anyone else could grab her,
she rushed across the dark cabin. “It's Santa Claus!” she screamed. “Santa's
on Mars! Mama, you were right! There's a Santa Claus on Mars!” As Doc bent to catch her in his arms, I
heard another child call out, then another, and suddenly two more kids
darted past the legs of the bewildered adults surrounding us. They were
all over Doc before anyone could stop them, least of all Kyle, who
suddenly didn't seem to know what to do with the gun in his hands, and
Doc was laughing so hard that I thought he was going to lose his
balance and fall back into the airlock with three children on top of
him, and everyone else was yelling in relieved surprise... Then Marcie turned to Kyle, who stood in
gape-jawed confusion, his blaster now half-raised toward the ceiling so
that it wasn't pointed at any of the kids. “So what are you going to do?” she
murmured. “Be the guy who shot Santa Claus?” He stared at Doc, then at me. “But it
isn't Christmas yet.” “Welcome to Mars,” I said quietly. “We do
things a little different here.” He nodded, then put the gun away. * * * * And that was our Christmas miracle. We dispensed some food from the lander;
the three children were handed toys from Doc's sack and the adults were
given two bottles of wine. Doc spent a couple of hours treating
injuries while I went back to the rover and radioed both Thankgod and
Arsia to tell them that we had located the lander. Arsia informed me
that the storm was ebbing in our region and that DaVinci had already
volunteered to send out a couple of rovers to pick up the new arrivals.
I relayed the news to Kyle, whom I learned was their leader; he
couldn't look me straight in the eye when he tendered an apology for
his behavior, but I accepted it anyway. By the time Doc and I left the crash site,
the first light of dawn was appearing on the eastern horizon; it might
be mid-summer back on Earth, but here it was the third sol of
Christmas. Peace on Mars, good will towards men. We completed that long, hard tour, and
returned to Arsia Station only a little later than usual. Once I had
put Miss Thuvia to bed, Doc and I decompressed in the Mars
Hotel. For the first time since we had started this little homecoming
ritual, we allowed ourselves to get drunk. No wonder Doc rarely got
blotto; he didn't hold his liquor very well. He sang dirty songs and
made jokes no one understood; it's a good thing no children were
present, because he would have ruined Christmas for them forever. The
last I saw of him that night, he was being helped out of the bar by two
of his girlfriends, neither of whom seemed likely to let him quietly
pass out before they gave him the mistletoe treatment. We made eight more Christmas tours before
I retired from service. By then I was married and running AeroMars; my
wife and business partners didn't want me leaving Arsia Station for
several sols each year to haul candy and toys to distant settlements.
Nor was it necessary for me to play Black Peter any longer; now there
were nineteen self-sustaining colonies scattered across the planet, and
nearly every one of them had their own homemade Sinterklass and Zwarte
Piet costumes. Doc, though, continued to play his role
every year, if only to take a rover out to nearby settlements. He was
the first and best Sinterklass on Mars, and everyone wanted to see him;
he relished the job, and continued it long after he set up a private
practice at Arsia. Toys and candy for all the children, wine for the
adults, and a different Zwarte Piet everywhere he went. It was what he
did, period. And whenever he came home, we got together for drinks and
small talk. Twelve years after we made the Acidalia
rescue mission, though, Doc didn't come back to the bar. He went out
alone to Ascension during another dust storm and ... well, vanished. No
final transmissions, and no one ever found his vehicle. He simply
disappeared, just like that. I miss Doc, but I think this is an
appropriate way to go. Mars is full of mystery; so is Christmas, or at
least it should be. The holiday got ruined on Earth because everything
wonderful about it was gradually eroded, the magic sucked away. Out
here, though, we've got a great Christmas, and a patron saint all our
own. He lives in the caldera of Olympus Mons. |
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