Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, December 2010. Copyright © 2010 by Scott William Carter. Originally appeared in Analog, December 2005. All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.
A Christmas in Amber
Scott William Carter
THE SNOWFLAKES BARELY touched the glass before they melted, the moisture swept aside by his humming windshield wipers, but Alan was still mesmerized. Not a word had been said about snow on any of the Evacuation Updates. Rain had been the forecast. Lots and lots of rain. It had been many years since he had seen real snow—twenty or thirty at least, back when Janis was still alive. And that had been at a ski resort, not Los Angeles. The last time he could remember it snowing in Los Angeles was when he was still in his twenties, some fifty years back, and he could never remember it snowing on Christmas Day.
The snowflakes wafted through the golden halos surrounding the streetlights before they vanished on the glistening pavement. He was amazed at how deserted the streets were. That never would have happened if not for the evacuation. There'd be gobs of kids outside trying to make snowballs. Every house in the subdivision looked the same, with gabled windows and brick facades, posh and expensive in every respect, so identical Alan was surprised when the autopilot turned the van into a driveway. He had been to the house lots of times, but still he couldn't tell it apart from the others. Only when he saw Michelle's face pressed against the bay window, hands cupped on either side, did he know he was in the right place.
She wore the purple A's baseball cap he had bought her when they attended the game the previous year. The blinking holiday lights around the window made her face green one moment, red the next. When she saw him, she waved excitedly and disappeared through the part in the curtains. So they hadn't told her. If they had told her, he doubted she would be smiling.
A sharp sadness stabbed at his heart. For a moment, he wondered if this was a good idea.
"Open all doors," he said.
The van's computer beeped in acknowledgement. The two front doors, the sliding side door, and the back doors all popped open. In his haste to get to his son's house on time, he had forgotten his jacket, and the chill wind sliced right through his thin cotton sweater. If Janis was still alive, he knew what she would say. Stepping out onto the pavement, he could hear her voice.
You trying to get pneumonia, Alan? Is that what you want?
"It's not like it matters now, dear," he said, catching himself when he realized he was speaking out loud. He had been hearing her a lot lately, and he had been trying hard not to answer. If the kids heard him, they'd worry.
The driveway was lit by two lamps, one on either side of the garage. The air smelled like the old pines that lined the street. The front door to the house slid open and Rick emerged, bulging brown leather suitcases under each arm. His hands were covered with thick mittens. He was dressed in the type of heavy blue parka somebody on an expedition up Mount Everest might wear, as well as bright red ski pants, a brown wool cap with ear flaps, and yellow rain boots, all of which looked brand new. Under all that garb his face was tanned a deep bronze, which Alan knew was a requirement of the part Rick had been playing—a professional surfer on that soap opera. This amused Alan to no end; as far as he knew, Rick had never been surfing. He hated both swimming and the ocean.
An image of Rick surfing in his current outfit flashed through Alan's mind, and he chuckled.
"What's so funny?" Rick asked, breath fogging. His curly black hair ruffled in the breeze. Janis had always called him muffin head because of his dome-like hair.
"Nothing," Alan said.
"It's cold."
"Yes, it is."
He made a motion to take the bags, but Rick shook his head and walked past. Katherine came out next, also dressed in a heavy coat and pants, also carrying bulging suitcases. The difference was that her clothes matched: they were solid white, hugging her model-thin body, and stylishly designed. Her blond hair was pulled back into a braided pony tail, sticking out the side of her Russian-style fur hat. Michelle came out right behind her, dressed in the same coat as her mother, but otherwise in rumpled jeans faded in the knees, dirty tennis shoes, and of course, the baseball cap. He knew her hair was as blond as her mother’s, but it was cut so short you couldn’t see it underneath the hat. A black backpack was slung over her shoulders, and he saw the eyepiece of her microscope jutting out the top.
How her parents had ever ended up with a child so dissimilar to them Alan couldn't say, but he was glad for it. She was more like him than his son had ever been. She was even saying she wanted to grow up to be a paleontologist. The thought of that made his chest tighten, and he forced it away.
"I'll help you," he said to Katherine, taking one of her bags.
"Oh, thank you," Katherine said, breathing a sigh. Up close, he saw that she was perspiring, her cheeks pink. Alan wondered if she had lifted anything that heavy in years. It must have been hard being without servants, he thought sarcastically, and then felt guilty for thinking it. He and Katherine had never gotten along great—hell, he and Rick had never gotten along great—but he needed to be positive now
"Dear," Rick said from behind the van, "think of his back."
"I'm fine," Alan said, but he did feel a twinge. Damn thing had been bothering him for years.
Rick made a noise that sounded like hummmph. It was a sound Janis used to make, a sort of disgusted resignation. Janis had been in the business, too, a television director. They had always been close, Janis and Rick. They had a bond that Alan could never understand.
Kind of like he and Michelle.
"Hey, sport," he said to her.
She beamed up at him, smiling with sealed lips. He knew she was embarrassed about the gap in her teeth. She had lost them a few months earlier, a couple days shy of her sixth birthday. He also remembered that her parents, obsessed with the preparations they needed to make after they received winning lottery numbers, had forgotten to put money under her pillow. Grandpa had given her a ten, telling her the tooth fairy had come to his house by mistake. She was a smart kid, too smart to believe this, but she had nodded just the same.
The snowflakes dotted the brim of her cap before turning into dark watermarks.
"You all packed, huh?" he said.
"Yeah," she said. "Hey Grandpa, guess what? We get to go on a spaceship!"
"I know," Alan said.
As if Alan might drop the bag at any moment, Rick quickly snatched the bag from him, scooting it into the van. Then he helped Katherine with her other bag. Alan helped his granddaughter take off her backpack, all while she chatted nonstop.
"Mommy says only a few people get to take a ride on the spaceship and we're lucky," she said. "She says we're going to be gone a while so I better take all the stuff I want to play with, so I made sure to bring my microscope."
"I see that," Alan said. "You bring any of your fossils?"
"No," she answered glumly. "Mommy says they're too heavy."
"Well, she's probably right."
"But I do have this!"
She reached into her pocket and pulled out an object that fit into the palm of her hand. When the lamps shined on the yellowish plastic, he knew what it was. He had bought it for her when they visited the California Academy of Sciences in June. The plastic looked more yellow than honey-colored; it was meant to look like amber, a facsimile of a new species of termite that had been found in Columbia, encased in amber, perfectly preserved after sixty million years. He had offered to buy her a t-shirt, but she had insisted on the little keepsake.
"Ah," he said, and for a moment he couldn't speak.
With the luggage secured, they boarded the van, everyone absorbed in grim silence. Except for Michelle. She talked about how she had never been in a spaceship and how it would be so much fun to tell everyone at school about it—when she started going to school again, whenever that was. Alan punched in the coordinates of the airport, and Rick, in the passenger seat, struggled to leaf through their evacuation paperwork with his mittens. As they pulled away from the house, Alan tried to think of something to say, something to lighten the mood.
"What's wrong, Mommy?" Michelle asked.
"Hmm?" Katherine said softly. "Oh, nothing."
"But you're crying. Did you hurt your hand on the seat belt?"
"Yes, dear. That's it."
"Okay. I'm sorry. I hurt my finger once on one of Grandpa's seat belts too. It hurts."
"I've got an idea," Alan said. "Why don't we sing some Christmas carols? I think that would be a lot fun." He tried to sound jovial, but he knew his voice wasn't ringing true. "Jingle Bells, anyone?"
"Maybe we should focus on watching the road," Rick said. "There might be some crazies out there, and the autopilot doesn't always know what to do."
"I'd like to sing," Michelle protested.
Katherine sniffled. "Yes, let's."
"All right, fine," Rick said. "Just don't let the van drive too fast, okay? We have plenty of time. We don't need to hurry. Hurrying we'll just get us in an accident."
Alan felt his irritation rise, then let it go. He was amazed he could feel irritated even today of all days. He cleared his throat and began to sing with his scratchy voice, and Katherine and Michelle quickly joined him. Rick focused his attention on his papers for a few blocks, as if there was something there that he could have possibly missed, but soon even he was singing. And that's how they passed the time as they made their way along the slick roads, the vents blasting warm air, the tires sloshing through water, soon out onto the ghostly highway, hardly a car on it. So many people, already gone, and those that weren't had headed somewhere in the middle of the country, though he knew it could hardly help them. The asteroid coming their way was bigger than the United States.
When they finished that song, they launched immediately into Frosty the Snowman, then Silent Night, then Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. He couldn't remember them singing like this ever, and here they were singing fools. When they were nearly to LAX, he wondered if they should be talking more seriously, but he didn't know what the point of it all would be. What needed to be said had been said well enough in the previous months. Now there was only the parting.
The only person he hadn't talked to about what was happening was Michelle, and he wasn't sure he could bring himself to do that.
It wasn't long before they had reached the airport, navigated through three different checkpoints manned by soldiers, past tanks and jeeps with guns trained on them, down a special road to a gated area full of hundreds of cars parked in neat rows separated by red cones. Papers were checked, retinas scanned. At the last gate, they had to get out, and their car was thoroughly searched, their bags run through an X-ray machine before being tagged and dropped into the back of a pickup truck. In the gated area bright fluorescent lights mounted high in the air gave the place the feel of a sporting event. Hundreds of people were making their way slowly to the far end, where out in the middle of the tarmac sat the white transport plane, it, too surrounded by enough artillery and soldiers to subdue a small country. The transport ships, fat, white, and ungainly in appearance, had been nicknamed "spaceducks." Now, surrounded by all that army green, it seemed all the more like a duck—a duck sitting on a grassy bank.
For the past two months, all over the world, the spaceducks had been ferrying the lucky few up to Little Earth. And that ship, as big as a hundred football fields, with a self-contained ecosystem that could theoretically (but only theoretically) maintain itself indefinitely, would carry a little over ten thousand passengers and crew to RNL-875—a planet around a star much like the sun, some 157 light years away. The best scientists in the world had determined that planet, out of the hundred or so identified, to have the best chance of having an environment hospitable to humans.
Alan knew that scientists had pegged the actual odds at something like one in ten thousand, and that was mostly guesswork and wishful thinking, but nobody talked about that much. In any case, it would be hundreds of generations before the ship arrived.
They parked the van and fell in line with the others, heading toward the last X-ray and retina arch before the tarmac; a dozen yards beyond that were the stairs up to the ship. The snowflakes were gone now, the air thick with a wet mist that clung to his skin. Michelle took his hand. Her fingers were small but warm within his own.
"Why is everybody crying?" she asked.
Rick and Katherine trailed behind, and he heard Katherine start crying again, Rick shushing her. All around them, much the same thing was happening. The line was moving quickly. They would be to final gate in no time, Alan knew. He just had to keep moving. One foot in front of the other.
Alan swallowed. "It's hard saying goodbye."
"But they seem so sad," Michelle said.
"Yes."