by Hank Davis
Against my better judgment, 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 formerly 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 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 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 as an archaic symbol of capitalistic society and Black Peter as a shameful holdover 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 a 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. 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 each other 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 seceeding 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. 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 rolle
d 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 to 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.
