by Allen Steele
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 driving 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 a 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?”
&nbs
p; 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 longer 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 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.
The Weight
1. LEAVING THE MOON
The first time I saw the DSV Medici Explorer was during primary approach by the lunar shuttle which ferried me to its parking orbit six hundred kilometers above the Moon. As the spider-like shuttle coasted around the sunlit limb of the eastern terminator and passed above the dark expanse of Mare Crisium, a small artificial constellation gently hove into view above the silver-gray horizon, gradually growing larger as the klicks fell away. The Medici Explorer and the three drone freighters it shepherds slowly swelled in size, gaining dimension and detail with each passing minute, until the vessel could be seen in all its enormous, complex majesty.
The Medici Explorer is fifty-six meters in length, from the gunmetal-grey nozzle of its primary engine to the grove of antennae and telescopes mounted on its barrel-shaped hub module; at the tips of its three arms—which were not yet rotating—the spacecraft is about forty-six meters in diameter. Pale blue moonlight reflected dully from the tube-shaped hydrogen, oxygen, and water tanks clustered in tandem rows between the hub and the broad, round radiation shield at the stern. Extended on a slender boom aft of the shield, behind the three gimbal-mounted maneuvering engines, is the gas-core nuclear engine, held at safe distance from the crew compartments at the forward end of the vessel. Although the reactor stack in Arm Three is much closer to the hub, it is heavily shielded and cannot harm the crew when it is in operation.
The Medici Explorer was already awake and thriving. Two days earlier, it had departed from Highgate, the lunar-orbit spacedock where it had been docked since the completion of its last voyage six months ago. During the interim, while its crew rested at Descartes City and the precious cargo of Jovian helium-3 was unloaded from the freighters and transported to Earth, the Medici Explorer had undergone the routine repairs necessary before it could make its next trip to Jupiter. Now, at long last, the giant spacecraft had been towed by tugs to a higher orbit where it was reunited with its convoy.
The shuttle made its final approach toward the vessel primary docking collar on the hub module. On the opposite side of the docking collar, anchored to a truss which runs through a narrow bay between the outboard tanks, was the Marius, a smaller spacecraft used for landings. The fact that the ship’s boat was docked with the larger vessel was evidence that the Medici Explorer’s crew had returned from shore leave; more proof could be seen from the lights which glowed from the square windows of Arm One and Arm Two.
Red and blue navigational beacons arrayed along the superstructure illuminated more details: an open service panel on the hub where a robot was making last-minute repairs; a hardsuited space worker checking for micrometeorite damage to the hull; the round emblem of Consolidated Space Industries, the consortium which owns the vessel, painted on the side of the hub. Then the shuttle slowly yawed starboard, exposing its airlock hatch to the docking collar, and the Medici Explorer drifted away from its windows.
During the final few minutes of the flight, I got one brief, final look at home. Earth was a mosaic of blues and whites and greens and tans, as gloriously alive as the Moon is sterile. There was just enough time for me to have last, irrevocable regrets about the long journey ahead before there was the hard thump of docking.
The shuttle pilot, a young woman with crew cut blond hair and a perpetual scowl on her sunburned face, ran her hands across the myriad toggles and buttons on her dashboard. There was a faint hiss as atmospheric pressure equalized between the airlocks, then an enunciator buzzed, signaling that the hatch was ready to be opened. She didn’t bother to unbuckle her harness; she would be here only as long as it took for her to unload her sole passenger.
“Okay, you’re here,” she said, cocking her thumb toward the airlock hatch behind her. “Out that way and through the tunnel. Watch your head and don’t forget your stuff.”
“Thanks.” I unsnapped the harness and carefully pushing my way out of my seat. “See you when I get back.”
It was meant as a polite goodbye. I had heard the same thing said many times, from one spacer to another, during the last several Earthdays I had spent on the Moon, waiting for my assignment to begin, but for some reason she found obscure humor in the statement.
She laughed out loud, not very pleasantly. “I won’t count on it if you don’t,” she replied, looking over her shoulder at me, and I recognized that as yet another customary exchange among spacers. Its meaning was all too clear: nobody lives forever…
Not an encouraging thought. But then again, Jupiter is a most dangerous destination.
The first crewman I met upon clambering through the shuttle’s short access tunnel into the Medici Explorer’s airlock was William Smith-Tate, the ship’s chief engineer. Had I been clairvoyant and known what he and I would go through in the months ahead, I would have ducked strai
ght back through the airlock and into the shuttle.
Bill was a squat, big-chested, broad-shouldered man whose dense beard and wide forehead gave him a brooding appearance, and he didn’t seem particularly inclined to welcome me aboard his ship. His handshake was very firm, his calloused palm almost completely enveloping mine, and it was hard not to wince at his grasp.
“You’re the last one aboard,” he said gruffly, almost an admonishment; only later did I realize that he had a thousand other things to worry about during the last two hours before launch, and the late arrival of a passenger was far down on his list of priorities. “I’ll have my boy take you to your quarters…hey, Bill! C’mere!”
From the other side of the airlock compartment, a young man’s head popped through the open hatch—upside-down, at least to my frame of reference. “Yeah, Dad?” he said. “I’m kinda busy at the moment…Kaneko didn’t stow his suit properly.”
The elder William silently cocked a forefinger, summoning his son into the compartment. He was not a man who accepted no for an answer. William Tate-Smith, Jr.—known aboard ship as Young Bill—reluctantly pushed himself into the airlock from the adjacent storage compartment. “Bill, this is Elliot Cole,” his father said. “He’s the writer Saul told us about.”
Young Bill was a sixteen-year-old version of his first-father, except in place of a beard he sported a long, brown braid of hair. He was also much taller than his dad; just a couple of centimeters shy of two meters, with the narrow-waisted, slender-limbed build of a young man born and bred in space. Floating next to the man who helped conceive him—a man who had been raised on Earth—he looked like a bean sprout next to a tuber.
“Hey! Glad to meet you, Mr. Cole.” Young Bill was still upside-down—perhaps deliberately so, trying to see if he could shake me up with a little display of zero-gee gymnastics—but he eagerly stuck out his hand. I fumbled to shake it and instead lost my grip on a ceiling rung and tumbled forward; he grinned mischievously, confirming my suspicions.
“Read your last book, the one about the Brazilian reforestation project,” he said. “Thought it was pretty bucho. Maybe we can talk later about the…”