Some time ago, I wrote a short story in the Imperial Mars universe where Moira reminisces about Christmases past. Originally I planned to give it away if people subscribed to my blog, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that without making people get a wordpress account, so I’ve decided to just post it here. However, I would really love it if people did subscribe to this blog. There’s a box for it in the right sidebar (or at the bottom, if you’re on mobile) and it would keep you from ever missing a post. I post about once a month about science, science fiction, writing, and anything you might need to know about my upcoming works.

This story will make more sense if you have read Black Sails to Sunward, but it shouldn’t spoil much of anything if you haven’t.

Christmas on Mars

I’ve sailed on no small number of ships in my time. Mostly merchant, and a Navy one once I was impressed. But all Martian, until the Estrela.

Nothing was the same, nothing at all. The titles weren’t, the customs weren’t, the rations weren’t, the decks weren’t. Everything seemed backwards.

But on any ship, you always have a ship’s dad. It isn’t the captain, ever, and it’s hardly ever the mate. It’s just the person you come to realize is the one to come to with your problems, if you’re the lowest of the low. Someone seasoned enough to know the answer, but not high ranked enough to think themself above you.

On the Estrela, it was Marron. He’d seen a lost Martian among the pirate crew and made it his job to make me welcome, showing me where to hang my hammock and how to operate the locker latches. And he never made me feel like an idiot for not knowing.

But a week out from Venus, I started noticing a weird secrecy among the crew. Not a conspiracy; I’d been in those, I knew the smell of them. But all against all. Every secret corner of the ship always had someone tucked inside, carefully working on something which they frantically stowed if you approached.

“Is it the captain’s birthday or something?” I asked Marron, as he whisked a folded fabric bundle into his locker. “Everyone seems to be working on secret projects.”

His dark eyes widened at me. “Don’t tell me on Mars you don’t even have Christmas!”

I blinked. It was hard to keep track of days in space, but I was pretty sure it was autumn. “Not now,” I said. “Summer Christmas was months ago.”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Summer Christmas? You have more than one?”

“Two a year,” I said. “I guess you’d only have one.” I had a vague idea of the Earth calendar: only twelve months, which the first Martian settlers had had to expand to twenty-four to fill up the 668 days it took us to get around the sun.

“We have one, yes, and it’s tomorrow,” he said. “I guess that means you didn’t get me anything.”

For a second I was stricken by his woeful expression. Then I laughed, and he threw his head back and guffawed. “You bastard, you want a prezzie you give me some warning next time,” I said.

He swore me to secrecy and took his bundle back out, which turned out to be a shirt he was embroidering for one of the environment crew. 

“We never did presents in space,” I said, kicking back against the wall. “Not much to give, with the weight you’re allotted.”

“That’s why we have to be creative,” he said. “Sewing, scrimshaw, whatever we have in our bags. Captain’s gift to the crew is usually extra rations.”

I sighed. My last Christmas had been aboard the Mariposa, barely noticed in all the other goings-on. The main thing I ever did for Christmas was write a card to my dads, which I post-dated months in advance to make sure it reached them on time. “The last time I got a Christmas present,” I said at last, “I was eighteen.”

“I hope it was a good one.”

I thought back on that Christmas. It was a warm memory, cozy, but full of all the old pains. For a long time I didn’t answer. Finally I decided to tell the whole story.

* * *

Christmas is a nobles’ holiday, I began. There’s two kinds of holidays on Mars, theirs and ours. Theirs are bank holidays and you get the day off. Ours are much more fun, and you might go to church or a temple if you have one. But the nobles don’t care what we have going on. It could be the most sacred day of your religion, you still won’t get the day off because they don’t give a shit.

But I don’t hate Christmas. The whole week ends up being special. Extra work, usually, if there’s going to be company at the big house. But gifts, too. The meanest employer would give you a scarf, at least. The Prescotts were better than that. Lady Prescott gave every single servant an individual present, plus five pounds, always. She couldn’t afford to do it, but that never stopped her from buying herself new dresses and she would be ashamed to let it stop her at Christmas either.

We weren’t house servants, so we weren’t responsible for the festivities going on in the big house. The Prescotts had company—they always had company. Social climbing was a way of life for them, and there was their daughter’s marriage to think of. What better way to get ahead of the game than by inviting a few good prospects to spend Christmas with them?

But after their Christmas breakfast, and the gifts, and Christmas dinner, they would invite everyone into the house for the servants’ dinner. This was winter Christmas, so we tramped through the snow to get from the stables, where we lived, to their house.

You don’t know a Martian southern hemisphere winter. They’re long, and it reaches levels of cold I don’t think they have on Earth. The snot freezes in your nostrils and your breath makes ice in your scarf. It’s too dry for the snow to get very deep, but the whole Hellas Sea freezes as far out as you can see. The stars are so bright they look hot. It feels like maybe the terraforming never happened at all, that you’re alone on a barren piece of ice too far from the sun to matter. I used to get scared maybe the atmosphere was broken, and this would be the year spring would never come. Because, you know, it’s six long months before it even starts to thaw.

But you get into the big house and it’s warm enough to hurt. The servants’ entrance is through the kitchen. We’d take off all our wraps and change into our indoor shoes, so we could look pretty and Christmassy. And there in the servant’s hall, Mrs. Aguilar would have our Christmas dinner all ready. Holly on the table, real candles, the family’s second-best china we weren’t usually allowed to eat off of.

And then the food! Salmon was the main course, that’s tradition, because it was what the first colonists had their first Christmas. But also dumplings and piroshki and wonton soup. And the desserts, too: pie and cake and little round cookies and fruitcake soaked in brandy. Mrs. Aguilar always made sure there was some of every dish saved for us. And wine, too, whatever was left from the family’s table.

Beside every plate were the gifts. I never knew if Lady Prescott picked them herself, or if some secretary did. New scarves, new socks, nothing unexpected, but always things we could use. We weren’t expected to return the favor. It wasn’t like we were equals.

When I opened my parcel, it was on the big side. Not socks, then. A blanket? I tore away the wrappings without any particular excitement. Then I froze. It was not any of those things. It was a pair of riding trousers, the exact kind I’d always wanted and known I couldn’t have. I had outgrown my old pair and had been wearing my father’s, rolled up. Lady Prescott could not possibly have noticed that, she never watched me riding. And as for Lord Prescott, his wife chose his clothes. He couldn’t have cared less about them.

Which made me know, instantly, where they’d come from. I slipped them down into my lap. 

“What did you get?” asked the man across from me—Boris, one of the coachmen.

“Pajamas,” I said quickly, and reached for the soup.

After dinner I hurried up the back stairs till I reached Lucy’s room. She was dressing for supper—Christmas requiring at least three outfit changes, at her level of society. That meant she was standing in her shift before her closet, the whole outline of her body visible through the thin fabric. I tore my eyes away from her in an agony of embarrassment, before she could turn around and see me looking.

“Oh,” she said, turning. “I thought it was Alice, come to dress me.”

“She’s not finished eating,” I said. “Want me to?”

She blanched. “No, I can. You’re not a servant—I mean,” she backpedaled desperately, “you’re not my servant. It’s not your job. Is what I mean.” She put on her stays backwards, poking the little strings through the eyelets. It seemed significantly more tedious than letting me do it, but clearly she didn’t want me to touch her.

I wouldn’t have touched her. I’d have been so careful. She wouldn’t have known me from Alice. 

But I flung myself onto her bed, dropping my shoes to the floor so I wouldn’t dirty her counterpane. “How’d you sneak my present past your mother?”

She grinned, eyes twinkling. “That’s the beauty of it. I didn’t have to sneak a thing. I told her I felt I was old enough to take over the gifts this year. She was happy to be rid of a job, and thought it was very mature of me to do it.”

“But the trousers,” I protested. “That can’t have been within the budget.”

“My mother can’t budget like I can,” she said. “I’ve been working on it for months. Got a big deal on scarves and gloves. I saved so much, I could get your dads coats too.”

My nose prickled, and I looked at the ceiling because the only other option was to gaze up at her like she was some kind of beneficient goddess. Coats for my dads—both of their old ones had thin elbows, I knew that, and a new coat was fifty pounds at least. An expensive gift would have meant nothing from her mother, but from her I knew it meant hours upon hours of effort, humiliating bargaining with shopkeepers, endless math to make sure the numbers came right. She hated doing it almost as much as she loved the nice things she could get that way.

“Well, thanks,” I said, my nonchalance ruined by a crack on the second word. “I didn’t get you anything nearly so nice.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” she said promptly.

Her words, casually meant, felt like a boot in the stomach. Of course not. Not by the laws of obligation between her and me. She was my mistress—or the daughter of my father’s master, same thing—and it was hers to bestow, and mine to be grateful. Mine to work, and hers to pay.

“Well, I did,” I said, more sharply than I meant. I sat up and pulled out of my pocket a little brown paper packet. “It isn’t anything half so special, or anything you particularly wanted, but.”

She had her stays turned around now and was fussing behind herself to tighten them up. I put the packet in her hand and came around behind her to adjust the strings. You can’t really dress yourself in that kind of clothes. That’s the entire point, isn’t it? So that everywhere you go, you can declare that you have that kind of help on command. 

Opening the packet, she took a sniff. “What is that?” she asked in wonder.

“Rooibos,” I said. “It’s an herbal tea. You can’t get it here.” I tied the strings in a knot behind her and pulled my hands away reluctantly. I’d been so careful not to touch her, and here I was disappointed I hadn’t somehow managed to accidentally do it anyway.

“Moira,” she protested, “is this illegal?”

“If I don’t tell you,” I argued, coming around to the front again, “you’re not responsible for what you don’t know.” Goods from Earth could only be had on the black market, but that only made them a mild challenge to get. If you knew the right people, you could get almost anything. Of course Lucy would never know the right people.

“You shouldn’t have,” she chided, but she was smiling. With her stays laced, her breasts rose deliciously over the top, lifting every time she breathed. My heart stopped beating. I looked into her closet, because I would die if I looked at her one second longer.

“So you’ll be wearing a frock for supper?” I asked, flipping through her dresses.

She was silent such a long time I was forced to look up. Her light brown eyes, the color of tea with milk in them, were worried. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“Because I gave you too big of a present. Because it made you feel bad.”

I sighed and dropped my hands from the hangers. Sometimes, once in a double moon, she could be perceptive. “I just wish . . . I don’t know.”

She touched my wrist lightly, then snatched her fingers away as if I’d burned her. When had she stopped touching me, I wondered. Had it been last year, the year before? Had her mother told her it wasn’t right to touch the help? “Tell me,” she said, her voice low in her throat. 

“I wish we didn’t have to worry about any of this. Who you are. Who I am. How much money either of us has to play with. It shouldn’t matter.”

“I know,” she said. “I miss when we were little and didn’t notice the difference.”

My cheeks heated. There it was, yet another difference. I’d never not been aware of it. I had no memory of when I’d learned that she was a noble and I wasn’t. It’s not the sort of thing commoners wait to explain to their children. They can’t afford to.

“Anyway,” I said, clearing my throat, “I loved your present. I know it wasn’t easy for you to make happen.”

“Anything for—for Christmas,” she said.

This was my cue. Leave and let her get back to her real life, schmoozing with her marriage prospects. With her gone at school except for holidays, I’d somehow been demoted to something outside her normal life. A treat, perhaps, but one to have in moderation. This was the end—I could see it now. She was almost eighteen. She’d put off her coming out as long as reasonably possible; I knew her mother was already planning for it at her next birthday. After that, she’d get swept into the whirl and sparkle of her first season, then probably married as soon as she’d taken her degree. What would I be to her after that? Just a reminder of old times?

No. I wasn’t going to let it happen that easily. Wouldn’t that be so convenient for everyone if I just gracefully faded away? If there was one thing I never wanted to be, it was convenient for her mother.

“Don’t go down yet,” I said. “I bet those terrible twins are still dressing. Let’s do something.”

She snorted lightly at “terrible twins.” Children of a family friend, a boy and a girl. Her mother, clearly, didn’t know how she planned to come out any more than I did, and she was hedging her bets. “Do what?”

I felt a grin spreading over my face. “Put on something ratty and come with me.”

* * *

It had been years since I’d led Lucy down the back stairs to the servants’ part of the house: the kitchen, the servants’ hall, the laundry. She wasn’t allowed, by any stretch of the imagination, but when we’d been little we could sometimes get away with it.

This time, I snatched her by the wrist and dragged her up the stairs instead. Above the level of the bedrooms was a low attic, somewhere I’d discovered a few years back and never happened to bring her.

She came to a halt at the top of the steps and turned slowly around, taking in the old chests, the broken furniture, the unmarked sacks. “I had no idea this was even here.”

I gestured at the clutter and dust. “You see why I told you to wear something old?”

Going to the tiny round window opposite, she cleaned it with her hankie. “I can see everything from here.”

Below was the stableyard, and the stable itself, my home. And beyond that, the red cliffs of the crater’s edge, too steep for even snow to cling to. She grasped my elbow, through my sleeve. “This is a better present than I got you.”

“That’s ‘cause you haven’t seen how good I’m gonna look in those pants,” I said.

She tilted her head to one side. “Is that part meant to be my gift to you, or your gift to me?”

Crap. I backpedaled. “Mine to the world,” I said dramatically and turned away from the window. “Let’s open some boxes and see what’s up here.”

What was up there was—everything. Everything too ratty to patch up and pretend was new, everything with no resale value or too much of the sentimental kind. “Remember this dress?” I pulled out a hideous gingham number with a purple-brown stain down the front.

“Ruined,” said Lucy, sitting down beside me. “When you smashed berries into it on purpose. You have no respect for clothes.”

“I only did that because you hated it!”

She pulled out the next thing, and for a while we just reminisced.

“Remember this?”

“Your dad was so mad.”

“Remember camping?”

“Remember how we got lost and ended up having to stay at a charcoal burner’s lodge?”

“I never got the smell out. Smell it!”

“Remember skating?”

“My mother was certain we were going to break through ten feet of ice.”

At the bottom of the chest, I paused. “It’s probably time to go down.” It was the last thing I wanted. I knew it could be the last time like this. I’d only just been assured she remembered—that she hadn’t really changed completely, that she was still the girl I used to know. But I was still something carved out of her real life. Something that didn’t belong.

She met my eyes for a moment, that startled, sad puppy look she always used to have when she heard her mother calling and had to say goodbye to me. The face she’d had as the train pulled away for another term at school. And then her eyes twinkled. “They’ll have to go on without me,” she said. “Just this once.”

So we stayed all evening, rooting through chests and bringing back memories. The light faded from the little round window, and she lit an oil lamp so we could keep going. In the dark her face looked younger, more like I remembered it. We really could have been kids again.

At last, when it was late enough her parents might actually start to worry, we slipped out, separating so they wouldn’t punish me for taking up her time. “Thank you,” I whispered, as we parted on the back stairs. “I know you’ve got better things to do.”

“I never have,” she said softly. “Only things I don’t get to choose.”

Then she went off to change her clothes, to apologize sweetly to the terrible twins, to accept the disappointed look from her mother. To her real life, that didn’t involve me, and the duty she felt to that life which always, always trumped her friendship for me. At that moment, I didn’t blame her. Maybe that was my gift to her, for once.

But those hours in the attic, those were her gift to me.

* * *

“So that’s why,” said Marron. “You’re not out for a ship. You’re out for her.”

My mouth flapped for a second. “That was a long time ago.”

“I’m talking about how your face looks now.”

“It’s not for her,” I ground out. “She hates me now anyway.”

He opted not to answer. Finished a few stitches, turned the shirt inside out, and inspected his work. Then at last he said, “I know what I want from you for Christmas.”

“I told you. I’m not getting you anything. I’m on the Martian calendar.” I kept my voice light, hoping this was a change of subject.

“Take me with you. You can pick your prize crew, right?”

“Why the hell would you leave the Estrela to go pal around with a bunch of Martians? We’re not a nice crowd.”

He flipped the shirt back around and started a new row of stitches. “I’ll worry about you otherwise. You said I was ship’s dad, yeah? Well the rest of my kids’ll be fine here. I’m not trusting my newest kid to a crew like that.”

Something warm bubbled up inside my belly. It had been so long since I’d seen my real dads, but he was so much like both of them. Casual, like Ramesh when he had a horse’s hoof in his lap, avoiding eye contact to keep the pressure off. But big and solid like Bill, when he would press cab fare into my hand and tell me to watch my back. A friend is a good thing to have, but a dad is a necessity.

I butted my head into his shoulder to hide my tears. He let his sewing drift away so he could hug me with both arms.

“You can be my first mate if you want to,” I said after a minute, pulling away and swiping at my eyes. “But I’m not sure if that’s a present from me to you, or from you to me.”

He grinned. “Mine to the world.”