by Hank Davis
“It’s that eat all you want and lose a pound a day diet. Works!” A customer came in to pay for some gas, so Jesse went back to restock the Oreos and Pecan Sandies.
The customer—he was paying with a credit card—said, “Your stock clerk looks a lot like Elvis, don’t you think?”
“No, not really . . .” I mean, I just thought of him as my friend Jesse, and never really thought much about his face, you know?
“Yeah,” continued the customer, pointing to some cigarettes, so I had to ring him up all over again. “Yeah, they’ve been seeing Elvis all over—the post office in Decatur, a McDonald’s in Fresno, the Baseball Hall of Fame . . . Now I’ve seen him here in a convenience store. Think I’ll make the papers?”
We laughed a little about that. Another customer, buying milk and bread, put her stuff down on the counter. “Don’t laugh,” she said. “Yesterday, totally unexpected, my cat dragged in an old monophonic record album, looking brand new. It was Blue Hawaii.”
We were pretty impressed by how strange that was, including Jesse, who’d come over to listen. “I tell you,” the lady continued, “something’s brewing. It feels kind of like a storm, about to break.” She noticed Jesse. “Hey, anyone ever said you look like Elvis?”
“No ma’am. Maybe Roy Orbison,” he answered.
She looked him over again. “Yeah, guess you’re right. Well, Merry Christmas everyone.”
Things stayed quiet for a while and, around midnight, Brian, the night supervisor came by to check on us. I didn’t like Brian much, he was always acting like he thought you were stealing money from the store, but I was real pleasant, and didn’t suspect much when he sent Jesse in back to inventory all the cookies and sodas, to see what we’d need extra to last over the holidays.
“Come here!” Brian called, from over the back aisle, where the candy and toys are.
“Uh oh,” I thought. Some kids must’ve snuck in while I wasn’t paying attention, and taken some toys and left the plastic containers behind. They do that if you don’t watch careful.
But everything looked okay on the novelty rack. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Brian. “I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas,” and he started to kiss me.
“Hey!” I said, trying to make like it was a joke. I mean, I needed the job, you know? “Hey, there’s no mistletoe here.” I pushed him away—and then he opened his mouth and showed me these fangs like the plastic Dracula teeth we sell at Halloween, only his looked real.
“Brian, what the . . .”
And suddenly he was biting me on the throat, and I couldn’t call for help . . .
I seemed to be sliding down this long dark tunnel, and there was a light at the end, and my parents, and my grandparents (except for Gran of course), and everyone I knew who ever died including my ninth grade boyfriend who fell in the drainage ditch, and all the dogs and cats I ever owned, were there to welcome me. Only when I got to the end of the tunnel, there was this view like in an old movie house with just one big screen, and it was showing Earth, and this big old rocky asteroid heading right for it. At first I thought it was something out of a Star Trek movie, but then I realized it was for real. And then the space scene was gone, and Elvis was there—Elvis himself—smiling at me. Just smiling. And he raised up one hand and said to me, “Go back and warn them.”
Next thing I knew, I was on the floor back in the Quik-Stop-Shop, and Jesse was putting cold rags on my forehead.
“I thought you’d died,” he said.
“I did!” I tried to sit up, making it the second time, and noticed the floor was all wet with milk, and this slimy yellow and red gunk I didn’t recognize, but smelled awful. “What happened—is that stuff Brian?”
Jesse nodded. “I threw milk on him—it dissolves vampires. Too wholesome or something, I dunno, but it works every time. Mind, you have to use whole milk. Skim or two percent just won’t work.”
“Jesse, you got to listen to this dream I just had.” I told him about the tunnel, and the asteroid, and Elvis. Jesse just rocked back and forth on his heels. Finally he said, “It ain’t no dream, Bobby June. It’s for real, and we must act quick if we’re to save the planet.”
I was still kind of dazed, what with dying and coming back and all, so I didn’t hardly protest when he closed up the store, and we started driving. I didn’t even really care where we were going. I just sat wrapped in a blanket—his pickup didn’t have heat—and looked out the window at the big old full moon.
“You see, this is the culmination of my stay upon the Earth,” Jesse said.
“Huh?”
“I’m the Twin who returned,” he said. “The one your little baby uncle was talking about.”
“Huh?” The night was weird enough without old Jesse getting bizarre on me. I looked at him like for the first time. He did look like Elvis. “Who are you?”
“Like I said, I’m the Twin. Elvis’s twin brother, Jesse, who supposedly died at birth, but who was really taken off planet and raised in a UFO.”
“You mean the UFO people who steal missing children and eat them?”
“Nope—those guys’re from Andromeda.”
“Then, the UFO people who take your pets or lawn ornaments for company, and return them a year later?”
“Nope—Betelgeuse.”
“Then how about the ones who hover outside your window and won’t let you eat junk food?”
“Those busybodies? I should hope not. No, my UFO was from the Southern Cross, and they’re real benevolent folk there.”
I suddenly began to snuffle. “Poor Jesse. Taken away from your family and raised with weird aliens.”
He took his hand off the wheel long enough to pat me on the shoulder. “It wasn’t that bad. The scenery was nice, and we got Lucy reruns on the radio telescope. Besides, I’m half-space alien myself, so I had kinfolk.”
His face got real sad. “Poor brother Elvis, he never even knew the truth about his heritage. That’s why he ate too much, and drank, and did drugs. Earth food didn’t have all the essential vitamins and minerals he needed.”
“Oh!” Suddenly it made sense, Jesse’s always sucking on a Tic Tac. “Your breath mints are from space too!”
“Right. They’re to compensate for dietary deficiencies, and to protect me from the pollution.”
Lots more was making sense. Like those Elvis sightings, all over the country. They’d been Jesse, just wandering about waiting for whatever it was he’d been sent to our planet to stop to happen so he could stop it. As he drove, he told me a little about how he traveled around, always one step ahead of reporters, and the KGB, and bad aliens who didn’t want him to save the Earth.
Then we got to where we were going, which was the observatory up near the university. I hadn’t been there since a field trip in second grade. Jesse got us inside—he could be real impressive—but the egghead types there were snooty, and wouldn’t believe us.
“Asteroid coming in to destroy us? Give me a break,” said the professor in charge, but then Jesse took him aside and whispered in his ear for a while, and when they came back, the man was pale. “Turn the scope around,” he ordered, and began searching the sky.
“What’d you say?” I asked Jesse.
He shrugged. “I just told him things only he knew about himself—like, he really doesn’t like sushi, and he always wanted to be a fireman, and he’s got this secret crush on Vanna White.”
It took a while, but then the professor came back, even paler, said, “You were right!” and began making lots of important phone calls.
Pretty soon—well, really it was hours later, but I slept through the flight to Washington and was still half-asleep when we met the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff—pretty soon we were at the United Nations. They’d let me call Tim from the White House, and the President’s wife, who was pretty nice, told them to send a plane to pick up Tim and Stacy so they could be with me.
So we were all up there at
the UN. First the professor talked, and a bunch of other professors from all sorts of countries agreed with him. Then everyone got in a panic, because this asteroid was going to hit the Earth in a month or so, and smash us to bits, and we didn’t have any missiles big enough to stop it.
I was kind of mad about that, thinking about Stacy not even getting old enough for kindergarten, and I said to the President, “Here I voted for you, and you spend all this money on bombs and stuff, and you can’t even stop one lousy asteroid.” He looked sort of upset, which got me feeling bad, so I apologized.
“It’s okay,” he told me. “We’re all a bit on edge.”
Then Jesse got up, and talked about how he had a plan and would need lots of cooperation. Our professor did some calculations and said it’d work. But lots of them still didn’t believe Jesse.
“I guess I’ll just have to convince you, then,” he said, and asked someone to fetch him a guitar, and right there in the UN assembly hall, he started to sing. And maybe his voice wasn’t much better than his brother’s, who you have to admit was the greatest singer ever lived, but Jesse’d been trained by aliens, and he knew how to use that extra nine-tenths of the brain that none of the rest of us uses, so it was the best singing anyone ever thought they’d ever hear. Pretty soon everyone didn’t know if they wanted to cry or applaud, and when they’d all calmed down and the medics had taken away the delegates who’d passed out or had heart attacks, everyone voted to go with Jesse’s plan.
So there it was, Christmas Eve day, and Jesse had a radio hookup to everywhere on Earth. They asked if he wanted translators, but he said no—and sure enough, when he started talking, slow and kind of loud, everyone understood him, no matter what language they usually talked.
“I want everyone in the Western Hemisphere and Europe and Africa to just stand real still,” he said into the radio. I was kind of awed, thinking how everyone all over the world was hearing my friend Jesse’s words. And trusting and believing him too, because he sounded like his brother, and everyone on Earth knows about Elvis. “And I want everyone in the East, in China and Japan and . . .” Well, I’ll just skip the list of countries, ‘cause I don’t exactly know where most of them were, or how to spell them either.
“. . . I want every one of you to go get a kitchen chair exactly eighteen inches tall—that’s forty-six centimeters—”
It was real impressive how smart Jesse was.
“You can put some books or plywood on the seat if it isn’t exactly eighteen inches. Now I want you to get up on those chairs, every one of you. Come on now.” He waited a bit, so folks who were old or young or maybe had arthritis could get onto their chairs. “Now when I say ‘Go’—hold on, not yet—when I say ‘Go’, I want everyone to jump. Okay, all ready?”
He looked over at me, and I smiled and crossed my fingers.
He leaned close to his microphone. “Okay. Ready, set—jump!”
And all over China and Japan and all those other countries, people jumped off their kitchen chairs.
The ground shook a little, and Stacy began to cry. I comforted her, and Tim put his arm around my shoulder.
The professor was talking on the phone to some other scientists, who were somewhere or other doing stuff, and he put his hand over the receiver and shouted. “It worked! It worked! When the Asians all jumped, they pushed the Earth slightly out of its orbit, so now that asteroid is going to miss us. We’re saved!”
Everyone began to cheer and hug each other. Then we got quiet, because we’d all noticed a day-glow orange UFO hovering outside the windows.
Jesse came over and took my hands. “You’ve been a right good friend, Bobby June, and I’m gonna miss you.”
Stacy said, “You goin’ somewhere, Uncle Jesse?”
He put a hand on her head—and her hair’s been blond and naturally curly ever since—and said, “My job, and my brother’s, is over, Stacy. I’m going home. But first . . .”
He took Tim aside a bit. “Now Tim,” he said, “I know you love your wife, but you have to talk with her.”
“But if I do, if she learns the truth about me,” Tim answered, “she wouldn’t love me no more.”
“Now, you know that isn’t true. Don’t be afraid,” Jesse told him.
Tim said to me, “Bobby June, I wouldn’t blame you if you leave me when I tell you this. The reason we never visit my relatives, and the reason I have so much trouble finding shoes that fit—sweetheart, I’m Bigfoot.
“Well, I’m not really Bigfoot,” he continued. “I’m just his little brother. But you get the idea.”
I said, “Honey, I wouldn’t care if you were the Loch Ness Monster, you’re still my man,” and I hugged Tim, and Stacy jumped up and down cause she could tell things were going to be okay from now on.
Jesse went to the window, stepping onto a gangplank from the UFO. “Wouldn’t you and your family like to spend the holiday with your relatives, Tim?”
“Sure would,” said Tim. “But we couldn’t get no flight to Oregon on Christmas Eve, and anyway, we don’t have no presents either.”
“Forget airplanes,” grinned Jesse. “We can drop you off on our way. And I’m sure we can find something around the saucer for you to give your folks.” He waved us to the gangplank.
“Oh boy!” cried Stacy. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever! And I also predict major conflict in the Mideast, a startling new career development for Linda Evans, and all the dogs in Denver will lose their hair but learn to speak . . .”
INTRODUCTION
ZWARTE PIET’S TALE
TO MANGLE VOLTAIRE (though I’m sure if he weren’t dead, he’d defend to the death my right to mangle it), if Santa Claus didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him. And after Mars was colonized, that was just what happened, though the results were sometimes unexpected . . .
ALLEN M. STEELE, JR.’S first published story was “Live from the Mars Hotel” in 1988. Since then he has written many more short stories, some of which have been collected in five volumes, nineteen novels, and essays, with his work appearing in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Japan. His novella, “The Death Of Captain Future,” received the 1996 Hugo Award for Best Novella, won a 1996 Science Fiction Weekly Reader Appreciation Award, and received the 1998 Seiun Award for Best Foreign Short Story from Japan’s National Science Fiction Convention. It was also nominated for a 1997 Nebula Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Altogether, he has won three Hugo Awards, along with the Locus award, the Analog AnLab Award (the story you’re about to read won one, in addition to being a Hugo nominee), the Asimov’s Reader’s Award, and other honors, most recently the Robert A. Heinlein Award for fiction promoting the exploration of space. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, he earned a B.A. from New England College and an M.A. from the University of Missouri. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife Linda and their dogs. His web site is www.allensteele.com
ZWARTE PIET’S TALE
by Allen Steele
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 smoothly 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 decompressio
n, 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 barreling 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 succeeded 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.