Allen Steele - Zwarte Piet's Tale

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Zwarte Piet's Tale

by Allen M. Steele

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Science Fiction

A DF Books NERDs Release

First published in Analog, December 1998

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or

distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper

print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe

fines or imprisonment.

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 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 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 barrelling 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 seceded 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.

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 every 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's 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 hempweed; 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 watch 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 skinny, 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 a

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 be 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.

Doc and I saw a side of the Martian frontier that most people on Earth didn't even know existed:

hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or malfunctioning equipment,

psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our

sorrows in homemade brew. There's many wonderful things about Mars, but it's not Earth or even the

Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it doesn't kill outright, it conspires to drive

insane.

Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what

we missed about Christmas.

* * * *

It was the third week of Aries, m.y. 53. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the

taprooms were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just returned from delivering

medical supplies to the poor schmucks at Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some

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-----------------------------------ZwartePiet'sTalebyAllenM.Steele-----------------------------------ScienceFictionADFBooksNERDsReleaseCopyright©1998byAllenM.SteeleFirstpublishedinAnalog,December1998NOTICE:Thisworkiscopyrighted.Itislicensedonlyforusebytheoriginalpurchaser.Makingcopiesofthisworkordis...

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