Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  Their belongings had already been loaded aboard the shuttle when we arrived, and the handful of other passengers were waiting to climb aboard. I parked the rover at the edge of the landing field and escorted Jeff and Karl to the spacecraft. I shook hands with Karl and wished him well, then turned to Jeff.

  “Your Majesty…” I began.

  “You don’t have to call me that,” he said.

  “Pardon me?”

  Jeff stepped closer to me. “I know I’m not really an emperor. That was something I got over a while ago…I just didn’t want to tell anyone.”

  I glanced at Karl. His eyes were wide, and within his helmet he shook his head. This was news to him, too. “Then…you know who you really are?”

  A brief flicker of a smile. “I’m Jeff Halbert. There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t really know what it is…but I know that I’m Jeff Halbert and that I’m going home.” He hesitated, then went on. “I know we haven’t talked much, but I…well, Dr. Rosenfeld has told me what you’ve done for me, and I just wanted to thank you. For putting up with me all this time, and for letting me be the Emperor of Mars. I hope I haven’t been too much trouble.”

  I slowly let out my breath. My first thought was that he’d been playing me and everyone else for fools, but then I realized that his megalomania had probably been real, at least for a time. In any case, it didn’t matter now; he was on his way back to Earth, the first steps on the long road to recovery.

  Indeed, many months later, I received a letter from Karl. Shortly after he returned to Earth, Jeff was admitted to a private clinic in southern Vermont, where he began a program of psychiatric treatment. The process had been painful; as Karl had deduced, Jeff s mind had repressed the knowledge of his family’s deaths, papering over the memory with fantastical delusions he’d derived from the stories he’d been reading. The clinic psychologists agreed with Dr. Rosenfeld: it was probably the retreat into fantasy that saved Jeff s life, by providing him with a place to which he was able to escape when his mind was no longer able to cope with a tragic reality. And in the end, when he no longer needed that illusion, Jeff returned from madness. He’d never see a Martian princess again, or believe himself to be the ruling monarch of the red planet.

  But that was yet to come. I bit my tongue and offered him my hand. “No trouble, Jeff. I just hope everything works out for you.”

  “Thanks.” Jeff shook my hand, then turned away to follow Karl to the ladder. Then he stopped and looked back at me again. “One more thing…”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s something in my room I think you’d like to see. I disabled the lock just before I left, so you won’t need the password to get in there.” A brief pause. “It was ‘Thuvia’, just in case you need it anyway.”

  “Thank you.” I peered at him. “So…what is it?”

  “Call it a gift from the emperor,” he said.

  I walked back to the rover and waited until the shuttle lifted off, then I drove to Hab 2. When I reached Jeff s room, though, I discovered that I wasn’t the first person to arrive. Several of his friends—his fellow monkeys, the emperor’s consorts, a couple of others—had already opened the door and gone in. I heard their astonished murmurs as I walked down the hall, but it wasn’t until I entered the room that I saw what amazed them.

  Jeff s quarters were small, but he’d done a lot with it over the last year and a half. The wall above his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he’d taped together, upon which he’d drawn an elaborate mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned: boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we’d ever seen before.

  That wasn’t all. On the desk next to the comp was the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn’t been satisfied just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin, each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten and handmade.

  I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title page: EDISON’S CONQUEST OF MARS by Garrett P. Serviss. I put it back on the shelf, picked up another: OMNILINGUAL by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled down yet another: THE MARTIAN CROWN JEWELS, by Poul Anderson. And more, dozens more…

  This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because he knew, in spite of his madness, that he couldn’t stay on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind. A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that had helped him through a dark and troubled time.

  The library is still here. In fact, we’ve improved it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the disk itself is in the base museum. And we’ve added a lot of books to the shelves; every time a cycleship arrives from Earth, it brings a few more volumes for our collection. It’s become one of the favorite places in Arsia for people to relax. There’s almost always someone there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or her lap.

  The sign on the door reads Imperial Martian Library: an inside joke that newcomers and tourists don’t get. And, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there myself. It’s never too late to catch up on the classics.

  Zwarte Piet’s Tale

  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 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 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; best to say that the 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 yiddish 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 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’ 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 weed; 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 watched 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 skin
ny, 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 an 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 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.