Holiday Station

Judith Tarr

If the Stationmaster hadn't got pregnant when he did...

Prologue: Happy Holidays

If the Stationmaster hadn’t got pregnant when he did, the rest of it would never have happened. It was his turn, it being baby number three and he being number three in the group-marriage rota, and the Stationmaster did take his duty seriously. The trouble was, he had to get pregnant just when Elthree was about to become Holiday Station.

All the El-stations were having to decide whether to go commercial or obsolesce. Elwun had folded outright; Asia Major shot it down for target practice. Elfive was an orbital pleasure palace—all right, not to be too finicky about it, a brothel. Eltwo and Elfour were still trying to hang on and keep the ships coming through, even with the big lunar stations for competition. Which left Elthree, and Holidays Incorporated, and a desperate grab for the tourist trade.

Which would have been a very good thing, except that this was Elthree. Trojan Point Tertius. Last and best enclave of Jehovah’s Scientists since they got run off Earth.

It’s not that Jehovah’s Scientists don’t believe in holidays. Or even that they think a man taking his turn having a baby is an abomination in the face of the Lord. It’s that Holiday Station had to open on Harmony Day, and the Stationmaster was the most convenient scapegoat, and—

But that’s getting ahead of the story, isn’t it?

Scene One: What Child Is This?

Stationmaster was pregnant, and he was at the miserable stage. Nothing fit, including the station-issue coverall, size extra-large, paternity cut. Here he was, bulging like Mother Earth in a convex viewplate, trying to maneuver through the jungle of cables and scaffolding that would, eventually, be Independence Era Module. Tech was running holos in the middle of the construction. George M. Cohan was dancing “Spacer Doodle Dandy” with Judy Garland in a very abbreviated Auntie Sam tutu, while the band played “The Stars and Planets Forever.”

On the other side of the production number, just as Mr. Cohan started to melt and ooze down the side of the bandstand, Stationmaster ran full tilt into a delegation from the Jehovah’s Scientists in Kingdom Module. Elder Mobius got the worst of it, seventy-five kilos of hurtling Stationmaster with baby on board; fortunately this was some ways out from spin center:, and they bounced when they landed, with Stationmaster rotundly on top.

The delegation hadn’t been in a wonderful mood to begin with. When Elthree voted to go public and incorporate, they voted resoundingly against, but they were too small a minority. Now, not only was their station invaded by the forces of Babylon, the very Whore herself had struck down Elder Mobius. Which he made clear at top volume, in phrases that blistered the paint off bulkheads as far down as Maintenance Six.

Stationmaster was normally a patient man. He had to be, to keep his job. But he was pregnant, he’d just been derailed on his way to welcome the first shipload of VIPs to Holiday Station, and the one and only coverall that still fit was split at the seams. He let go with a blast of his own.

There was bare metal on the bulkheads in Maintenance Six. The delegation was so shocked it actually retreated, dragging a frothing Elder Mobius. Stationmaster stopped in the middle of a word. He looked around. The holos were all frozen, even the puddle that had been George M. Cohan. Tech was carefully looking elsewhere.

“Damn,” said Stationmaster. “Double and triple damn.”

Over in the corner, a holo started to whistle “Dixie.”

Scene Two: Maiden Mother Mild

“This,” Aunt Margaret said, “I don’t like at all.” We were hiding out in Old Module, the one that’s supposed to be shut down but somebody forgot to turn off life support, so there we were, and there was the terminal with its antique keyboard and broken voder and 2-D screen that at least still worked. I was supposed to be at my school terminal in Kingdom Module, but with Daddy out being an Elder I could plug in the Yes-Daddy-I’m-Here macro and go somewhere interesting. Aunt Margaret was supposed to be in a module with holo capability.

Aunt Margaret’s a ghost. A holo, I mean, but Old Module isn’t supposed to support full-service holoimaging, and she was right next to me, as big as life and only about half blurry around the edges. I couldn’t feel her or anything, no cold chills. She was just there.

She was .leaning over my shoulder, frowning at the screen, which she’d made me split. One half showed Stationmaster, bulging out of a fresh shipsuit, welcoming a gaggle of VIPs to Harmony Day Module. The other half showed Elder Mobius and the other Elders, which included Daddy, sitting around a table and not saying much, except for Elder Mobius, who was in a rant. There wasn’t anything to hear, with the voder broken, but Aunt Margaret didn’t need a voder.

“Violence is never a useful solution,” Aunt Margaret said to the screen. She always looks severe, she can’t help it. Her face was her fortune as she likes to say, but it wasn’t your usual kind of fortune. First time she showed up she gave me nightmares for a week. She was in persona then, green skin, black pointy hat, broom and all. Except she talked like a nice maiden lady, and I knew inside of a millisecond that she wasn’t any kind of wicked witch. My subconscious needed a week to be convinced, but that’s a subconscious for you.

Anyway, she can’t help but look severe, with her big hooked nose and her thin mouth, but right now she looked downright grim. “What are they going to do?” I asked her.

She looked at me. I thought for a minute she looked just a little greener and wickeder than she usually does, with a shadow doing duty for a pointy hat. Then she was Aunt Margaret again in her nice silk dress and Early Hollywood ’do, and she said, “I never did believe in the sins of the fathers, least of all with you. Still, I wonder. . . .”

I love Aunt Margaret even if she is a ghost, but sometimes she’s just too adult for words. “They’re going to blow up a module, aren’t they? They’ve been talking about it ever since they lost the vote on Holiday Station. Which one are they going to try for?”

“Harmony Day Module, of course,” Aunt Margaret said. That’s one thing about her being a ghost. She can change gears in a nanosecond, and she doesn’t natter on or act silly about what children know. Not that I am a child, mind you, I’ll be thirteen Standard in Threemonth, but you know what I mean.

And of course it would be Harmony Day Module, seeing as to how the opening was supposed to be on Harmony Day and in the Module. “That’s so painfully obvious,” I said. “Security will stop them before they ever get that far.”

“I’m not sure of that,” Aunt Margaret said. “Security has enough to do with the mobs of visitors coming in; it’s grievously understaffed. And to be quite blunt, my dear, your father and the rest of the Elders are not the most highly respected men in the station.”

I knew that. I’d heard people say so, and not just when I was trolling through the net. “Oh,” they’d say, trying to be charitable and broad-minded and religiously correct, “Jehovah’s Scientists. Yes. Fascinating sect, just fascinating. But a little . . . odd, don’t you agree? All that insistence on only the most primitive of technology—holograms as tools of the devil, if you’ll believe it—why, they barely educate their children.” Which last part wasn’t true, I had a teaching terminal just like anybody else in Elthree, it just didn’t have holoimaging, that was all.

No, Daddy didn’t know about Aunt Margaret. In case you’re wondering.

And now I suppose you see what the problem was with Holiday Station. It was supposed to be one huge complex of holoimages, with realmeat staff in costume to do the work, and some of the most complex programming in the System. The ads were making it out to be a triumph qf technology, which it was.

And here was Kingdom Module right in the middle, full of people with a religious objection to holoimaging. Normally the Religious Autonomy Act would apply, but you couldn’t expand it to a whole station when only one module was affected. There were no holos in Kingdom Module. Kingdom Module had shuttle bays and exit ports of its own, as well as bypass corridors for outsiders, so nobody in it had to go through other modules to get in or out or to receive supplies. That did it for the RAA. Kingdom Module was autonomous, technically, and that was it. No way around it. No appeal.

So the Elders were taking the only really spectacular way out. “Nobody believes they’ll do it,” I said. “They’re just those funny little men in the funny little module, aren’t they?”

I must have sounded more upset than I was, because Aunt Margaret tried to pat my shoulder. I didn’t feel any touch, but I felt better somehow, a little. Even when she said, “They won’t listen if you try to warn them.”

“But—” I started to say, then I stopped. I’m really not a child. I can see what’s in front of me, which was, in that case, that I was twelve years old, still a minor under any code, and my father was an Elder of the Jehovah’s Scientists. They might pat me on the head and offer sanctuary, seeing as to how I was obviously unhappy with my parental allotment, but they wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. Children exaggerate, right? They blow things out of proportion. And Security was drastically understaffed, and Stationmaster wasn’t in a mood to listen to anyone, let alone me.

Still, I thought. There had to be something I could do. Something spectacular enough to get everybody’s attention, but not so spectacular it backfired.

“Aunt Margaret,” I said, “they’re not really going to do it, are they?”

Aunt Margaret says it’s not polite to point, but this once she pointed at the screen. I don’t know what she did. The voices didn’t come through the broken voder, but there were words under the screen with the Elders in it. Elder Mobius’ mouth was moving. The words said, You all appreciate, I’m sure, the symbolism of a sequence of detonations in the shape of the carbon molecule. We stand for life under universal law—not for the life of artificial constructs.

The second half of it was straight out of his favorite sermon. The first half was enough to tell what I wanted to know.

I felt cold. It wasn’t as if it was any surprise. Violent solutions are allowed in the Book of Albert, if nothing else will work. I just hadn’t expected them to go that far.

“They can’t be that stupid,” I said. “They’ll all go into permanent detention, and everybody will know how retro they are.”

“But Holiday Station will be crippled,” said Aunt Margaret. “It operates on the edge now. It has to open successfully, or it goes under. It can’t afford even a small disruption, let alone one of this magnitude.”

I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. “They’ll close the station?”

“They’ll have to,” she said.

What she wasn’t saying was if the station closed, we all had to leave. I’d go into an orphanage or whatever they did to the children of criminals down on Earth. But she couldn’t leave. She was part of the system. When it was shut down, she went with it.

Not that I really needed encouragement. I just had to be sure there wasn’t any other way out.

“All right,” I said, and took a deep breath. “How far down can you go in the programming?”

Aunt Margaret didn’t answer for a bit. Let’s say she was processing data. It looked as if she was figuring out what I meant, and making a decision.

Then she said, “How far do you need to go?”

Scene Three: Prince of Peace

Harmony Module was up and running at full capacity. There was real snow on the ground, and more falling at just the right speed. The big old Inn was lit up everywhere, and people kept pouring in, past the doorposts wrapped with fir and holly, into the foyer with its tree that went up all the way to the ceiling, and on to the ballroom where the music was the very best Irving Berlin, live or holoimaged. Bing was playing host to the hilt. Fred, minus Ginger, was being just the right kind of cad. All the men were sleek and sophisticated, and all the women were blonde and beautiful.

The VIPs were like kids on Harmony morning, all wide eyes and ohs and ahs. “Is this real?” one of them squealed, grabbing at a glass of champagne. He squealed again when he found out it wasn’t a holo. I saw the waiter stop to breathe after his crosscourt sprint. The other realmeat staff got the point: they started being a little more careful about staying around the VIPs.

Aunt Margaret was at her own screen, another one in the bay that she’d powered up. She didn’t need it and she couldn’t use the keyboard, but it did help to have two full screens. When I looked, hers had a schematic, blue dots flagged in red.

“Holoimages,” she said, pointing to the blue. “Live action,” tapping one of the red with a finger that didn’t quite touch the screen. I could see that it was a diagram of the module, with enlarged detail of the Inn, where everybody was.

“Are these what I’m afraid they are?” I asked. Some of the red dots had yellow ones attached.

On my screen there wasn’t anything to see. Just people milling in a ballroom.

“Oh, they are clever,” said Aunt Margaret. “They’ve subroutined the security programming. It doesn’t see anything they’re bringing in.”

My screen certainly didn’t. I’d have recognized faces if there really were people from Kingdom Module impersonating holoimages. All I saw was a blur, and a lot of blondes in slinky dresses.

“However,” said Aunt Margaret in her crisp last-century voice, “they seem to have reckoned without me.” She allowed herself a bit of a cackle, just enough to make my backbone shiver.

I didn’t have very much to do once I keyed in the lines of code Aunt Margaret gave me. Nobody knew about these terminals, you see. If they had, they’d have shut them down. But they were old and obsolete, and they needed somebody who could use a keyboard, which was basically me, because Aunt Margaret showed me how.

The code opened a very particular line of access. Aunt Margaret was running down it, or the AI that was Aunt Margaret was. She’d warned me that she couldn’t keep her holoimage going past a certain level, so when she, started to flicker, I didn’t get too terribly alarmed.

By that time the red-and-yellow dots on her screen were starting to move. They were supposed to be casual, stroll along, drop their devices in planters and under mistletoe and even in a tuba. Then they’d get out as fast as they could, and their timed bombs would detonate Harmony Module in the name of the Lord.

The party was in full swing, or whatever they used to say. The VIPs were swimming in champagne. It was getting easier to tell real from holo. Real was red in the face and starting to stagger.

I hadn’t seen Stationmaster anywhere in the crowd. He had to be there or be impolite, but he must have had some trouble thinking of a way to look authentic. I could see the rest of his connubial group, looking a little more sober but not much less happy than the VIPs.

And then in he came, ho-ho-ho-ing and scattering gift-wrapped cheer. The red suit didn’t need much padding. The white beard almost hid his titchy expression. His party was a roaring success, but he looked too pregnant to care.

One of the svelte blondes tripped over his sack and went flying. Half a dozen people scrambled to rescue her. Five of them grabbed air. The sixth mutated.

Aunt Margaret was in full persona. She picked up the blonde in a hand like a claw, and the blonde shriveled into a broomstick that she brandished while she wailed her lines. “Beware! Beware the tides of treachery!”

Wrong script, I thought. Not that it mattered what she said, as long as the diversion worked.

Every blonde in the room changed at once. A crowd of winged monkeys flapped toward the chandeliers. The suave men in black and white swelled into green-faced soldiers with pikes, stabbing at anyone who hadn’t changed.

The VIPs were in a huddle. Some of them were laughing. “Jolly good show!” one kept whinnying. “Jolly good!”

Stationmaster was hemmed in by soldiers. I’d have thought it would dawn on him of all people that they weren’t real, but he stayed where he was.

Unfortunately, other people didn’t stay put. They’d been Aunt Margaret’s red-and-yellow dots: men in tuxedos on my screen, with anonymous faces, thanks to some clever reprogramming. They still had tuxedos, but I knew who they were. One of them was Daddy. Daddy’s wrongheaded about some things, like holoimaging, but I’d have thought he was too old for this, or at least too smart.

I thought as fast as I’ve ever thought in my life. I didn’t know if I could do what I had to do—Aunt Margaret had made some major changes in the routines—but I tapped out the codes anyway. And the system hung on me.

I hit the screen so hard I almost broke my hand. Then I got up to start running. Harmony Module was clear at the other end of the station. I’d never get there in time to do anything, but I couldn’t sit there and watch Daddy get caught.

Something happened on the screen. I had to blink to see. My eyes were leaking like a baby’s. Cool, calm, save-the-station me, right. That was Daddy out there. He was bone stupid and dead ignorant, but he was still Daddy.

Maybe he was there. I couldn’t see. A whole troop of soldiers closed in where he’d been standing. If he tried to walk through them, he didn’t have any luck. They just kept surrounding him in a sort of infinite loop.

The others were running to drop their cargo. The more they ran, the more the holos ran with them. They must have been dizzy, but they were strong in the armor of the Lord. They kept on coming.

I started praying. “Please. Please let Security catch on. Please.”

If that was sinful, then it was sinful. I can’t believe any self-respecting, scientific deity would let people blow up a module. Even if they did say they did it in his name.

Security wasn’t doing a thing. Aunt Margaret’s soldiers were herding giggling VIPs toward the doors. “Is there another show outside?” one of them asked. Somebody else was being sour. “Eclectic. Much too eclectic. An extravaganza needs some dramatic unity.”

“All right,” I said, not to the critic. “Aunt Margaret, I know you said not to, but I have to.” I hit the macro I’d been saving.

Sirens went off all over Harmony Module. I’d stolen the voice from Aunt Margaret’s best film. Maybe I should have gone with Charlton Heston, but the Wizard sounded more like it to me. “Stop in the name of the Lord! Drop your weapons, swear peace, or be damned to everlasting.”

Not much for script, but the volume flattened everybody with functional ears. Including most of the Elders’ agents.

One still wouldn’t drop. He wasn’t old enough to know any better. I turned the volume up another notch. “Jonathan Save-the-Faith Mercer-Meyers, you put that bomb down now!”

I’ll say one thing for the training we get. It gives us incredible guilt reflexes. Jonathan dropped the thing he’d been carrying. It hit the floor with a clatter. He, being only about half stupid, bolted straight for the door.

And there we were with a dilemma. The VIPs were outside in the snow, being wrapped in synthfurs by staff who still didn’t seem to have caught on. Every soldier in the ballroom had dropped his pike when I let go with my Wrath-of-Jehovah speech. Jonathan had gotten away. Daddy was trying to find his way blind through a constantly repeating sequence of soldiers. The rest of the Lord’s assassins were flat on their faces.

Aunt Margaret saw the problem about as soon as I did. She stopped whirling and walked up to the Stationmaster, who hadn’t moved a muscle—maybe he couldn’t. “Really,” she said in her normal voice, “I think you’d better summon Security. Your module is about to be blasted out of orbit.”

Stationmaster might be titchy, but he wasn’t a splutterer. He took one look where Aunt Margaret’s broomstick was aiming, saw the lump of metal and coils that Jonathan had dropped before he ran, and said perfectly calmly, “Security. Priority One alert. Instanter.”

Epilogue: Harmony Day

So that’s how Aunt Margaret and I saved Holiday Station from the wrath of Jehovah’s Scientists. Not that anybody knows about us. As soon as Security showed up, Aunt Margaret’s program went back to default, blondes and men in tuxedos. Debugging didn’t come up with anything. It wouldn’t, with Aunt Margaret doing the programming. They just decided that it was an encrypted Security subroutine, which actually it was, and closed the file on it.

As for Elder Mobius and the rest, Stationmaster had his own way of dealing with them. Security took them all into custody, there wasn’t any getting around that, but they had to wait a while. Stationmaster had his baby on Harmony night, and they named her Harmony, what else?

When Stationmaster was up and tending to the station again, he had the prisoners brought in. They weren’t exactly repentant, though some of them looked embarrassed.

“So,” he said, looking as severe as Aunt Margaret, which took doing: Stationmaster is a round man even when he’s not pregnant, and the most he can usually do is look titchy. “You know that your offense, under station law, could earn you the capital penalty.”

“We die in the name of the Lord,” said Elder Mobius.

“I don’t think so,” said Stationmaster. Elder Mobius opened his mouth to start thundering. Stationmaster cut him off. “No, I won’t make martyrs here. You did

a very foolish and potentially murderous thing in a fairly reasonable cause. I can take you to trial, knowing that you would very likely be condemned. Or I can offer you an alternative.”

“What alternative is there but death?” Elder Mobius asked, putting on his most annoyingly smarmy expression.

“Why, several,” said Stationmaster. “You can be accorded the status of an isolationist state. Once your module is sealed, no one will enter your module and no one will leave it, and supply runs will be performed solely by machines. Or you can be deported either to Earth or to one of the lunar colonies. Or, as I said, you can stand trial for crimes against the station.”

“We choose trial,” Elder Mobius said promptly.

Daddy wasn’t supposed to be there, but somehow he’d gotten in. He clapped a hand over Elder Mobius’ mouth and looked Stationmaster in the eye. “Is that all you can offer us?”

“It’s all you’re entitled to,” Stationmaster said.

“Maybe,” said Daddy, “but then again, maybe you’re sitting on something else. Maybe there’s restitution to be made on both sides. You robbed us of access to the station under our laws. We might have blown up the station, but we didn’t. What if we take care of this old blowhard, and you shift Kingdom Module out past South Pole, where we can carry on our lives in some sort of peace?”

“That’s the isolationist option,” Stationmaster pointed out.

“No, it’s not,” said Daddy. I was proud of him right then, even if he had carried a bomb in the name of the Lord. Probably he felt he had to. Daddy’s like that. “We’ll keep our jobs, those of us who can do it without sinning. You’ll assess us a good, fair fine for our transgression against your people, which we’ll pay in wages and goods. And we won’t try any further sabotage, on pain of isolation, exile, or death.”

It went back and forth for a while, but in the end they went with Daddy’s solution. It took a lot of swallowing all around, which Aunt Margaret says is the way of the world. She doesn’t just mean Earth.

We’ve still got the terminals set up in Old Module. There’s been some talk of making it over into another part of Holiday Station, but so far none of it’s come to anything. Maybe we help that along a bit. Aunt Margaret’s been teaching me about holoimaging, damning me hopelessly, of course, but I can’t help it, can I? Not all witches are bad witches, and not all holos are empty constructs.

Someday we’ll rebuild Old Module our way. I know just where I’d put the Emerald City, and just what I’d do with those unbearably silly Munchkins.

“Do be kind, Dorothy,” Aunt Margaret says to me, “and do be accurate. Even the wickedest witch of them all never dined on Munchkin à la Queen.”

“There’s always a first time,” I say as darkly as I can. Aunt Margaret always looks severe, and her nose gets just a little sharper, and her chin just a little pointier, and she goes just slightly green; but she never stays irked with me for long.

“The Munchkins I can bear,” she says. “Just. That simpering idiot Glinda, however, that miserable excuse for a self-respecting witch. . . .”

She’s too polite to spit, but not to put on her most spectacular persona. She mounts her broomstick in a swirl of black skirts and pointy hat and flies cackling down through the long empty module, trailing blood-red smoke. It’s spectacular. It’s shivery-making. It’s Aunt Margaret all through. And maybe as she flies, just for a second, I feel a touch of ghostly cold.

Copyright © 1993 by Judith Tarr

First published: Christmas Ghosts, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg (DAW)