"Allen Steele - Zwarte Piet's Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

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Zwarte Piet's Tale
by Allen M. Steele
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Science Fiction


A DF Books NERDs Release
Copyright ©1998 by Allen M. Steele

First published in Analog, December 1998
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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