“We’re in a spacecraft. It can’t snow here. We’ll still have Christmas though. We’ll decorate the apartment.” Dr. Kette didn’t sound convinced. “We don’t need snow for Christmas.”
Robyn stamped her foot. It was half-hearted. Martin knew she couldn’t really throw a tantrum. She was too nice a child for that.
“We can’t even put up colored lights! Four days until Christmas! No snow and no lights.” Robyn’s tears were real.
Dr. Kette sat on the ground beside her. “I miss them too.”
Embarrassed, Martin moved farther away. He’d never had a family. Too much lab time. But the image of Robyn leaning against her mother affected him. He wanted to hold her too, to tell her it would be all right. Dr. Kette cried also. Mother and child displaced, no different from the animals wandering beyond.
After a bit, Martin approached, touched Dr. Kette on the shoulder. “You guys will freeze if you stay out here.”
The woman looked up at him. “We really are a long, long way from home.”
Martin couldn’t do anything about snow. At 5,800 feet to the Ark’s center, there wasn’t air enough for clouds. Winter ground fog was common though. In the fall and spring, when the transition between the day’s heat, the night’s temperature drop and the humidity was just right, it drizzled for a few minutes in the morning, but no snow. He thought about Robyn crying.
A crew meeting the next morning discussed the upcoming holiday. A party was proposed. Debate followed, a dispirited affair. The head of research argued, “Even if we are in exile, we can celebrate—we need a celebration.”
“What is there to be joyful about?” countered Dr. Roam, the head of the medical unit, his lab coat meticulously pressed, his hair combed straight back and tight against his head, like a helmet. “It’s ghoulish for us to be merry while our families on Earth suffer.”
Martin sat in the back of the conference room. He thought about the deterioration of the news. Before they’d left, the worst of the mutagen births clustered in pockets. California suffered, as did Canada’s western coast and Alaska. Martin had heard stories of monstrous polar bear cubs, mewling in the snow, hairless, deformed, abandoned by their mothers. The Midwest and the East were untouched. So the pattern continued the world over: some areas hit hard, others were not. The mutagen spread slowly; it had taken twenty years to get this far. For twelve years the Arks were built, and then, a year ago January, populated with animals from the untouched areas. The crew came from areas with no unnatural births.
As if waiting for the occupation of the Arks as a signal, the mutagen’s progress accelerated. No place was free of it. From the Ark they watched the fear rise. It built. Cities burned, and there were no uncorrupted births. Fish or fowl, beast or man, the babies were not right. Most died, but more horribly, some lived. The crew could hardly bear to look at the pictures.
Against the back wall, the children sat. Maybe they are the last young ones we’ll see, thought Martin. Maybe they’re the end.
Someone else said, “The animals are sterile. Even the rabbits have had no litters. Not even lab mice. We haven’t saved anything by coming here. We should be in fully equipped laboratories searching for a cure. Running away solved nothing.”
People muttered to each other, while the Captain waited for someone to raise their hand.
Dr. Kette said, “We expected most animals would lose a breeding season. That’s a well documented effect of dislocation. It’s too soon to tell, and there is the wolf. She should deliver soon.”
Dr. Roam said, “Wolf pups would prove nothing. Even if they’re good, it’s only a matter of time before the mutagen breaks out here too.”
“We don’t know that,” offered Dr. Kette.
“Yes, you do!” thundered Roam. “The women know. We have been here eleven months, and there are twenty-seven women among us. Not one pregnancy. The women know we have no reason to celebrate.”
Martin glanced again at the children. Robyn sat near the door. She held a crumpled drawing. A part of it showed through, a Christmas tree with ornaments and lights. As the argument grew, she twisted the paper tight. Her eyes were red, but she never cried. She looked lost.
In the end, they voted for no official celebration.
Later, while in his zero-G work station, Martin adjusted the magnetic fields holding the ionized gasses in place. The biologists suggested the animals might feel more at home if the moon waxed and waned distinctly. He adjusted the monthly cycle according to their numbers.
When finished, he contemplated the length of the Ark. In the middle, the sun glared, intolerably bright, nearly a third of its daily distance across the sky. Around it, trees pointed toward the axis; cliffs, hills, bluffs, stretches of meadow, streams (water pumped from the lakes at their bottoms to springs at their tops) surrounded the light. An unbroken landscape, a whole one—no horizon separating any one part from another. He found this vision comforting, a perfect visual metaphor for life’s unity, and he couldn’t feel Dr. Roam’s despair, or any of the others. Thinking of the children, Martin wrote invitations to a Christmas party at sunset, Christmas Eve. He set the place, the central-Ark observation area, then sent them. He turned back to his equipment. There was work to be done; he had a party to prepare.
Martin arrived early, an hour before sunset. He took a tube transport that traveled on the Ark’s outside. An elevator carried him and the supplies to a flat, sandy clearing overlooking a small cirque. At the hollow’s bottom a lake reflected darkly. A startled mountain goat scrambled from the water’s edge, tumbling small rocks as it leaped to the top. Most splashed through thin ice into the lake, and the goat disappeared into a boulder field.
He’d pressed the kitchen to make candy canes, and hung them from leafless bushes surrounding the clearing. As he hung the last one, the early guests stepped out of the elevator.
Four-year-old Elise, the youngest child aboard, found the first candy. She held the cane out for everyone to see, and soon the other children busied themselves finding more of the sweets, even the Nyuen twins who were thirteen. Talk was muted. Almost mournful. Martin remembered Dr. Roam’s pronouncement, “We have no reason to celebrate.” The adults clustered around the radiant heaters, warming their hands. Robyn solemnly poked through brittle branches, looking for the last of the candy.
Martin crouched beside her. “Where’s your mom?”
Robyn tucked a cane into her shirt pocket. She looked down, scuffing dirt with the toe of her shoe. “She went to see the wolves. She’s been gone all day. I told her it was Christmas Eve, but she had to work.”
“Ah, that’s too bad.” Martin gave her another candy cane from the extras he kept in a pouch. She added it to her collection.
“Thank you. I’ll save them until later.”
“There’s hot chocolate in the thermoses,” he said.
Robyn sighed and headed for the crowd. Now that the candy had been found, all stood near the heaters.
Hilliert, an older biologist, called his son, Brad. “We really have to go, Martin. This was nice of you, but I don’t think we’re in the spirit.” Other scientists nodded their heads. “It’s cold, and we ought to get the kids home.”
Martin glanced at the sun. It had reached the western wall and begun its dimming cycle. Chill stung his cheeks. “I have a surprise, but we have to wait a few minutes. There’s a thermos with hot chocolate that’s mostly rum in my bag over there, if you want to break that out.”
Hilliert raised his eyebrows and put his hand on his son’s head. “We’ll stay a bit longer, Brad. Maybe we could sing a carol.”
Gradually the sun faded out. Long shadows became less and less distinct, and soon the only light came from the heaters glowing orange in the clearing’s middle. Martin stood behind the circle of parents and children, hands thrust deep into his pockets. Robyn tucked her hands into her armpits and didn’t join the singing. They finished two verses of “Good King Wenceslas” before someone said, “It’s pretty darned dark out here, Martin. Where’s the moon?”