by Allen Steele
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 its 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 received 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’état 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 succeeding 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 Planitia. 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. But 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 gentil
e 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 Planitia, 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 as 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 added two more as a fudge-factor, 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 tape deck; 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 awa
re 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 shit?”
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.