Rudolph! (3 page)

V

I
n the nineteenth century, the French engineer Gaspard-Gustave
Coriolis discovered that the rotation of the Earth had an effect on the direction of the streams of air that swept across its surface. Dubbed the Coriolis Effect, this observation on the part of old G-G detailed the fact that, because the Earth spins to the east, objects in the Northern Hemisphere have a tendency to turn to the right when they are moving on a straight path, while objects Down Under gravitate towards the left. While this has an effect on the water in your toilet bowl, it makes no difference to circular thinking.

Somewhere over the Tropic of Capricorn, I went Stockholm on Santa. I hadn't gotten anywhere with logical arguments and rational reasoning, so I figured I might as well take advantage of his steady diet of pop psychology from TV and pretend to be swayed by his arguments. Santa wasn't going to be deterred from his mission, and all the noise I was making to the contrary was just giving him a headache. The first thing I do to get rid of a headache is to remove the object or sound that is causing me pain. By going friendly, I'd decrease the chance of getting dropped out the chute like an express delivery toy. And if I could turn the old Stockholm Syndrome ploy to my advantage . . . 

Besides, he was bigger than me, and he was packing hardware. I could cite either one as an excuse on my thousand-page report, and no elf would fault me on the decision to play nice.

Santa was napping—supersonic flight didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. Once we passed the equator, he started getting comfortable in the chair, and when we crossed the wide mouth of the Amazon, he started snoring.

I didn't bother with the controls. The autopilot was on, and I knew the reindeer were monitoring the flight status. There were redundant controls in their pods, and any attempt on my part to alter the path of the sled would alert them.

I amused myself with checking email back at the North Pole.

There were more than a hundred unread messages in my inbox, and only half of those looked to be from the office of EOD. I figured the Network Jockies in TM had flagged my account to sing like a fat canary the moment I touched the network so there was no point in pretending that I hadn't seen all the exclamation points in my inbox. Since most of those emails were going to cover the same ground, I replied to the most recent one. Old school telegraph style. Just to let them know I was holding it together.

"Am Fine. Stop. Gone holiday shopping with Fat Boy. Stop. Be back in time for Zero Hour. Stop. He's not holding a gun to my head. Stop. But he does have one. Not sure where he got it. This is
way
outside my job description. Stop."

In addition to all the other amenities that the Mark V sled packed, it also contained a great deal of surveillance countermeasures. If Santa didn't want to show up on radar, he wouldn't. The NPC usually tracked the sled during Zero Hour through a network of relayed GPS coordinates that the Sled's navigational system uploaded to our high orbit network, but I was pretty sure the reindeer had figured out how to switch off that relay. A couple of them are pretty clever, and Rudolph—well, he survived the Cold War after all; he's had a long time to master the art of selective paranoia. The Network Jockeys would probably do a packet trace on the reply I just sent back to the mail server at the North Pole, but all they'd get would be the address of the satellite that the sled had tapped to send the email. There were something like fifty-two of these little communication and positioning satellites parked in geosynchronous orbits, each scanning approximately 1/50 of the Earth's surface at any given time for incoming signals. That's a lot of square kilometers, and at the rate we were moving, they'd never get enough of a fix to be sure where we were heading.

Not that I was all that sure myself. Santa and the reindeer were on a course for purgatory—or what they thought was the entrance to purgatory. Sure, I had found a computer address on the Internet. Sure, it indicated there was a machine out there running some kind of firewall software and it might have some other data structure local to it. But you couldn't make the jump from there to the positive existence of life after death.

David Anderson had been involved in a car accident on November 27th of this year. The funeral had been held on December 7th. There was a plot of land in the local cemetery in Troutdale that contained a box and stone, one with him in it and the other with his name on it. Now, if I believed those two details—and since they were true, why shouldn't I?—then there weren't a whole lot of options.

1. Little Suzy had a fascination with dead things that couldn't be certified by any psychologist as "healthy," and what she wanted for Christmas was for us to dig up Daddy's head, slap a red bow on it, and roll it under the Christmas tree.
   
2. Little Suzy's fascination with biology and botany and Wade Davis meant that she was hoping that we'd dig Daddy up before the zombie powder that had been sprinkled on him before they put him in the ground wore off.
   
3. Life did persist after death, and we were going to knock on the gates of heaven and ask God to give us David Anderson back.
   

Okay. Now for the rebuttals.

1. Too weird, even for this elf.
   
2. Nobody noticed Daddy wasn't really dead when they embalmed him? Filling Daddy full of formaldehyde would probably constitute a money-back situation with the funeral home, but it certainly wouldn't make his resurrection from a Voodoo-inspired, medicated state any easier. Flag it as highly doubtful.
   
3. Well, as a famous detective once said, when you eliminate the possible solutions, what remains—however unlikely—must be acknowledged as a very likely solution. And a couple hundred years prior to that fellow, another wise man once said: "
   Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate.
   " Keep it simple, stupid.
   

The autopilot said we were heading south—all the way south. And what did we hope to find there? The entrance to purgatory, which—if I was going to keep things simple—appeared to be somewhere near the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic.

VI

S
anta turned off the autopilot as we crossed the Ross Ice Shelf,
and shortly thereafter he adjusted a couple of dials and pulled back on the sled's stick. Our heading changed, and the sun, perpetually parked overhead at this time of year, filled the cockpit with its orange glow. The material of the cockpit blister filtered just about every sort of wavelength but the visible spectrum, and even under that radiant bombardment, it polarized sharply to cut the glare. Santa flipped a few more switches, and then hit the red button that switched on the Time Clock Wave Generator. The TCWG was a localized field generator that kept the sled and team in sync with the Clock at Zero Hour. It shouldn't have done anything without the Clock on—the wave generated by the device would collapse almost instantly on its own—but Santa directed my attention to the column of white light that was now visible. "There," he said. "That's the way."

"Yeah, I see it," I replied. I didn't know what else to say, really. The Time Clock wave had shifted us out of sync enough to reveal the entrance to purgatory—the quintessential tunnel of light. It didn't disappear into infinity; in fact, it didn't look much longer than the car wash at any local gas station. As Santa piloted the sled into line with the glittering mouth of the tunnel, there was a wrenching sense of vertigo as I looked up the shaft of light. From the mouth of the tunnel, it certainly looked like it went on to forever.

Santa maneuvered the sled right into the center of the tunnel, and toggled the afterburners. The Mark V rumbled beneath us. Everything went black for an instant as the intensity of the light increased and the polarization sensors in the cockpit tried to compensate. There was an awkward sensation of weightlessness coupled with the disorienting panic of all the individual cells in my body trying to move in eighteen different directions at once, and then the ride became smooth again. Ridiculously smooth, even.

Transparency returned to the cockpit blister. We weren't over the South Pole any longer. There was no sky, no cloud cover below us, no hot sun sizzling in space over head. Everything was white. There was no horizon because there was no sense of ground beneath us. It was all just white.

Expect for a small patch of green and brown off to our left.

Santa had already spotted it, and he adroitly turned the sled towards the splash of color. I found the controls for the camera systems and pulled up the nose camera, dialing in the magnification. There was a small field of green grass, and sitting primly in the center of this seemingly unsupported green field was a small brown house. Large windows looked back at us and there was a wide set of double doors. Illumination spilled out from the interior of the building, revealing a pleasant arrangement of comfortable chairs. Some of the seats near the windows were filled with people in white robes.

Santa carefully brought the sled down toward the lawn, and there was a tiny rumble beneath me as the landing gear reached out and made contact with the ground. "Well," he said, pushing the sequence of buttons that locked the sled in place. "It looks like we're here."

"Here being a relative term," I pointed out as he cycled the hatch. The air was cool and there was a lingering smell that reminded me of the way the Residence smelled when Mrs. C was baking something in the kitchen. Santa let me go first, so I went carefully, not quite sure what I was going to step on. It looked like grass and seemed to be supporting the weight of the sled, but part of my brain still thought I was going to fall right through the illusion as soon as my foot touched the ground.

The grass was firm but spongy, kind of like the surface of a well-groomed Chia Pet. I took a couple of hesitant steps, wondering if the sensation in my knees was what Neil Armstrong felt when he first cavorted on the surface of the moon.

"Nice lawn," someone said. "Seems familiar, though . . ."

Rudolph was big, even by reindeer standards, and his dark body was completely hairless. His horns were bone white and sprouted out of his head like awkward tree branches caught naked in the midst of winter. Back in '64, there had been an accident with the old Clock—the nuclear powered one—and we had lost the entire reindeer team. Santa had been down in a house at the time or he would have been baked into Santa Strips. Rudolph should have died with the rest of the team too, but for some reason—maybe he had been far enough away from the Clock that the radiation dose hadn't been enough to kill him outright—he survived. Though, if the Eyes Only NPC reports filed by the Old Quacks from that era were to be believed, he was permanently irradiated. There was no question he stopped clocks when he passed—delicate machinery broke down if it spent too much time in close proximity to him, and if you left a frozen burrito in the same room with him for ten minutes, it'd be warm and ready to eat. He could—if he wanted—make his nose glow, just like the kids expected. Of course, he usually set the drapes on fire and rendered the dog sterile when he lit up, but hey, everything's got a side effect these days, so why should being bathed in the ruby glow of a reindeer's nose be any different?

He was, like the rest of Santa's reindeer, a complete pain in the ass. More so, because he was like that stereotypical old fart who was always yelling at the damn kids to get off his lawn. He wasn't our favorite reindeer.

Well, Mrs. C liked him. And no one really ever said "no" to Mrs. C.

I ignored Rudolph and his weird black humor, and stumped towards the pair of doors. Santa chuckled behind me, but even his famous joviality seemed subdued. The doors of the building opened smoothly as I approached, and I paused on the threshold as the warmth and smell of the shop washed over me.

"Smells just like—" Rudolph began.

A robed figure with sandals and close-cropped white hair swooped up to meet us. He looked like one of those vampire kids that were still popular among the teen readers—seventeen going on a hundred and sixty—and his teeth were somehow whiter than his robe. Pinned over his left breast was a tiny sword-shaped brooch. The blade was outlined in orange. On his right pectoral was a tiny stick-on nametag. It read: Mike.

"Hello," he gushed. "Welcome to Café Perkatory."

"—coffee," Rudolph finished.

"Are you here for a beverage?" the old young man asked. "I don't mean to brag, but our coffee is simply the most divine blend."

"Shade grown on the hills of Oaxaca?" Rudolph asked.

The greeter wrinkled his nose at the hairless reindeer. "Good guess, but no. We carry GOB, exclusively." He waved a hand over towards the counter. "Right over there. Just tell the barista what you want. Latté, mocha, cappuccino, brevé—whatever you desire, they can make it for you."

"GOB?" Santa whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth.

"God's Own Bean," I whispered back, somewhat appalled that the translation of the three letter acronym had come so quickly to me. That said something about how long I had been in the corporate world. Talk about purgatory.

Our host was still chatting with Rudolph. "If I had to guess," Mike said, "I'd peg you as a quad grande skinny extra whip caramel mocha."

Rudolph let out a short bark. "Oh, you can see right through me, can't you?" he tittered in a voice that made my sphincter pucker. Seriously? Do not tease the irradiated reindeer.

Santa—exuding some of that natural serenity that made standing in line to get your picture taken on his lap seem like the most pleasant afternoon ever—laid a hand on the reindeer's tense flank. "Do you offer other services?" he asked. "Is this café wired for the Internet?"

The greeter flashed his pearly whites again. "Absolutely." He pointed towards the far wall where a computer monitor sat on a walnut desk. "The terminal over there is plugged right into a 10GbE backbone. No firewall filtering, anonymous remailer services, no cookie presets, no popup advertising, and—" he winked at Santa "—no site or download restrictions."

He smiled down at me. "And you, young man, what about you? Are you here for Passage?" There was something in his eyes—was it a touch of sorrow?—as he asked.

"No," I stammered. "No, I'm not." I jerked a thumb at Santa. "I'm with him."

The moment of human empathy passed on Mike's face, replaced by a confused expression that made him seem younger. He looked out at the spoon-shaped sled parked on the lawn. "None of you are here for Passage? Someone still in your conveyance, perhaps?"

Rudolph shook his head. "Well, we do have some friends along but they wanted to wait in the car."

Santa's hand moved to my shoulder, and he pushed me towards the monitor in the back of the room. Rudolph stayed behind to torment the greeter. "It's the craziest thing," I heard him say, "none of us are dead. I don't know where we took the wrong turn, and I'm really surprised you don't recognize me . . ."

Santa kept me on course through the maze of plush chairs. A large fireplace was quietly chewing through a pile of logs. The trio of individuals behind the counter were dressed like the host—just as androgynous and just as perfectly formed. In addition to offering espresso drinks, they also had a fully stocked bakery and ice cream parlor. The people scattered about in the chairs all had full beverage at their elbows and were contentedly thumbing through glossy magazines. None of them appeared too concerned with the large red "Now Servicing" number on the wall—and I did a double-take when I realized it was showing a rather large number in scientific notation. And no one even glanced at the unmarked white door at the back of the room. To me, it was almost impossible not to look at. Was that the door to . . . ?

Santa pulled me back from the door and shoved me into the chair at the computer station. "Okay," he said, his hands resting on my shoulders. "This is what we came here for."

The screen saver was the floating logo of the coffee house—a flat-rimmed espresso cup with wings—and it vanished when I touched the mouse. I poked around on the desktop and checked out a few menu options. It seemed like some homegrown UI over a modified LINUX OS, but I hadn't seen the variant before. Santa's hands tightened on my shoulders when my movements faltered. "What is it?" he hissed.

"It's a dummy terminal," I said. I pointed at the thick cable that ran from keyboard into a port in the wall. "There's no computer here. It is just a keyboard and monitor that do I/O for a larger system that's somewhere else." I lifted the keyboard and showed him the blank top of the desk. "And there's no sticky note."

"But what about the computer that this is connected to?" Santa asked.

I poked around a bit more. "This is just a glorified Internet browser, Santa. There isn't much else here."

He bent over and his voice was tense in my ear. "Can you get a terminal window?" His hand was a claw digging into my collarbone.

I fussed around a bit, and discovered that I could—in fact—get a terminal window open. "Huh," I said, somewhat surprised at the glaring hole in the system's security.

"That's it," he hissed. "Come on, Bernie. I know that's all the opening you need. I've heard the stories. I know you can do this."

I looked up at the glittering light reflected in his eyes, and felt the tension in his fingers. This was one of those defining moments, wasn't it? Nothing else mattered, and what happened next would shape untold generations to come. Or some such silliness. Right here. Right now. You either took the chance, or spent the rest of your life wondering what would have happened.

A voice in my head—the part of me that was holding out against the whole Stockholm Syndrome scenario—tried to get my attention. Something wasn't right . . . 

I took a deep breath, pushing that voice away, and put my fingers on the keyboard.